II 11 It 




Class 
Book 




Copyright^ . 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT: 




bee page 130 



AT THE OPERA 



IMAGINARY 
I N T E RVI EWS 



BY 



W> D. H O W E L L S 



ILLUSTRATED 




HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 
NEW YORK AND LONDON 

i 9 i o 



1*= 

s 






Copyright, 1910, by Harper & Brothers 

Published October, 1910 
Printed in the United States of America 



'CLA273529 



CONTENTS 

IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

CHAP. PAGE 

I. The Restoration of the Easy Chair by Way of 

Introduction 1 

II. A Year of Spring and a Life of Youth .... 13 

III. Sclerosis of the Tastes 22 

IV. The Practices and Precepts of Vaudeville . . 32 

V. Intimations of Itallant Opera 44 

VI. The Superiority of Our Inferiors 57 

VII. Unimportance of Women in Republics .... 67 

VIII. Having Just Got Home 77 

IX. New York to the Home-Comer's Eye .... 87 

X. Cheapness of the Costliest City on Earth . . 97 

XI. Ways and Means of Living in New York . . 107 

XII. The Quality of Boston and the Quantity of New 

York 117 

XIII. The Whirl of Life in Our First Circles . . 127 

XIV. The Magazine Muse .137 

XV. Comparative Luxuries of Travel 146 

XVI. Qualities without Defects 156 

XVII. A Wasted Opportunity 166 

XVIII. A Niece's Literary Advice to Her Uncle . . 176 

XIX. A Search for Celebrity 184 

XX. Practical Immortality on Earth 194 

XXI. Around a Rainy-Day Fire 204 

XXII. The Advantages of Quotational Criticism . . 216 

XXIII. Reading for a Grandfather 226 

XXIV. Some Moments with the Muse 236 

XXV. A Normal Hero and Heroine Out of Work . . 244 

Hi 



CONTENTS 



OTHER ESSAYS 

CHAP. PAGE 

I. Autumn in the Country and City 255 

II. Personal and Epistolary Addresses ..... 264 

III. Dressing for Hotel Dinner 274 

IV. The Counsel of Literary Age to Literary Youth . 283 

V. The Unsatisfactoriness of Unfriendly Criticism . 296 

VI. The Fickleness of Age 306 

VII. The Renewal of Inspiration 316 

VIII. The Summer Sojourn of Florindo and Lindora . 326 

IX. To Have the Honor of Meeting 338 

X. A Day at Bronx Park 350 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



AT THE OPERA 



Frontispiece 



• 



FIFTH AVENUE AT THIRTY-FOURTH STREET Fac 

FIFTH AVENUE FROM THE TOP OF A MOTOR-BUS „ . . . 
CHARLES EMBANKMENT, BELOW HARVARD BRIDGE . . 

THE MALL, CENTRAL PARK 

BROADWAY AT NIGHT 

ELECTION-NIGHT CROWDS 

ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS, BRONX PARK 



ngp. 88 ^ 
94. 
120 

156 
256 
260 
352, 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 



THE RESTORATION OF THE EASY CHAIR BY WAY 
OF INTRODUCTION 

It is not generally known that after forty-two years 
of constant use the aged and honored movable which 
now again finds itself put back in its old place in the 
rear of Harper s Magazine was stored in the ware- 
house of a certain safety-deposit company, in the win- 
ter of 1892. The event which had then vacated the 
chair is still so near as to be fnll of a pathos tenderly 
personal to all readers of that magazine, and may not 
be lightly mentioned in any travesty of the facts by 
one who was thought of for the empty place. He, 
before putting on the mask and mimic editorial robes 
— for it was never the real editor who sat in the Easy 
Chair, except for that brief honr when he took it to 
pay his deep-thought and deep-felt tribute to its last 
occupant — stood with bowed face and uncovered head 
in that bravest and gentlest presence which, while it 
abode with us here, men knew as George William 
Curtis. 

It was, of course, in one of the best of the fireproof 
warehouses that the real editor had the Easy Chair 
stored, and when the unreal editor went to take it 

1 



IMAGINAKY INTEKVIEWS 

out of storage he found it without trouble in one 
of those vast rooms where the more valuable furni- 
ture and bric-a-brac are guarded in a special tutelage. 
If instinct had not taught him, he would have known 
it by its homely fashion, which the first unreal editor 
had suggested when he described it as an " old red- 
backed Easy Chair that has long been an ornament of 
our dingy office." That unreality was Mr. Donald G. 
Mitchell, the graceful and gracious Ik Marvel, dear to 
the old hearts that are still young for his Dream Life 
and his Reveries of a Bachelor, and never unreal in 
anything but his pretence of being the real editor of 
the magazine. In this disguise he feigned that he had 
" a way of throwing " himself back in the Easy Chair, 
" and indulging in an easy and careless overlook of 
the gossiping papers of the day, and in such chit-chat 
with chance visitors as kept him informed of the drift 
of the town talk, while it relieved greatly the mo- 
notony of his office hours." Not " bent on choosing 
mere gossip," he promised to be " on the watch for 
such topics or incidents as " seemed really impor- 
tant and suggestive, and to set them " down with 
all that gloss, and that happy lack of sequence, which 
make every - day talk so much better than every - day 
writing." 

While the actual unreality stood thinking how per- 
fectly the theory and practice of the Easy Chair for 
hard upon fifty years had been forecast in these words, 
and while the warehouse agent stood waiting his pleas- 
ure, the Easy Chair fetched a long, deep sigh. Sigh 
one must call the sound, but it was rather like that soft 
complaint of the woody fibres in a table which dis- 
embodied spirits are about to visit, and which continues 
to exhale from it till their peculiar vocabulary utters 
itself in a staccato of muffled taps. ~No one who has 



RESTORATION OF THE EASY CHAIR 

heard that sound can mistake it for another, and the 
unreal editor knew at once that he confronted in the 
Easy Chair an animate presence. 

" How long have I been here ?" it asked, like one 
wakened from a deep sleep. 

" About eight years/' said the unreal editor. 

" Ah, I remember," the Easy Chair murmured, and, 
as the unreal editor bent forward to pluck away certain 
sprays of foliage that clung to its old red back, it de- 
manded, " What is that?" 

" Some bits of holly and mistletoe." 

" Yes," the Easy Chair softly murmured again. 
" The last essay he wrote in me was about Christmas. 
I have not forgotten one word of it all: how it began, 
how it went on, and how it ended ! ( In the very prom- 
ise of the year appears the hectic of its decay. . . . 
The question that we have to ask, forecasting in these 
summer days the coming of Christmas which already 
shines afar off, is this : whether while we praise Christ- 
mas as a day of general joy we take care to keep it so. 
. . . Thackeray describes a little dinner at the Tim- 
minses'. A modest couple make themselves miserable 
and spend all their little earnings in order to give a 
dinner to people for whom they do not care, and who do 
not care for them. . . . Christmas is made miserable 
to the Timminses because they feel that they must 
spend lavishly and buy gifts like their richer neigh- 
bors. . . . You cannot buy Christmas at the shops, and 
a sign of friendly sympathy costs little. . . . Should 
not the extravagance of Christmas cause every honest 
man and woman practically to protest by refusing to 
yield to the extravagance?' There!" the Easy Chair 
broke off from quoting, " that was Curtis ! The kind 
and reasonable mood, the righteous conscience incar- 
nate in the studied art, the charming literary allusion 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

for the sake of the unliterary lesson, the genial phi- 
losophy — 

' not too good 
For human nature's daily food' — 

the wisdom alike of the closet and the public square, 
the large patience and the undying hopefulness! Do 
you think," the Easy Chair said, with a searching se- 
verity one would not have expected of it, " that you are 
fit to take his place V 9 

In evasion of this hard question the unreal editor 
temporized with the effect of not having heard it. "I 
believe that he and Mr. Mitchell were the only writers 
of your papers till Mr. Alden wrote the last ?" 

The Easy Chair responded, dryly, " You forget 
Aldrich." 

" If I do, I am the only pebble on the shore of time 
that does or will," retorted the unreal editor. " But 
he wrote you for only two months. I well remember 
what a pleasure he had in it. And he knew how to 
make his readers share his pleasure ! Still, it was Mr. 
Mitchell who invented you, and it was Curtis who 
characterized you beyond all the rest." 

" For a while," said the Easy Chair, with auto- 
biographical relish, " they wrote me together, but it 
was not long before Mr. Mitchell left off, and Curtis 
kept on alone, and, as you say, he incomparably char- 
acterized me. He had his millennial hopes as well as 
you. In his youth he trusted in a time 

' When the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm 
in awe, 
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law/ 

and he never lost that faith. As he wrote in one of 

my best papers, the famous paper on Brook Farm, 

4 



RESTORATION OF THE EASY CHAIR 

i Bound fast by the brazen age, we can see that the 
way back to the age of gold lies through justice, which 
will substitute co-operation for competition.' He ex- 
pected the world to be made over in the image of 
heaven some time, but meanwhile he was glad to help 
make it even a little better and pleasanter than he 
found it. He was ready to tighten a loose screw here 
and there, to pour a drop of oil on the rusty machinery, 
to mend a broken wheel. He was not above putting a 
patch on a rift where a whiff of infernal air came up 
from the Bottomless Pit — " 

" And I also believe in alleviations,' ' the unreal 
editor interrupted. " I love justice, but charity is 
far better than nothing; and it would be abominable 
not to do all we can because we cannot at once do every- 
thing. Let us have the expedients, the ameliorations, 
even the compromises, en attendant the millennium. 
Let us accept the provisional, the makeshift. He who 
came on Christmas Day, and whose mission, as every 
Christmas Day comes to remind us, was the brother- 
hood, the freedom, the equality of men, did not He 
warn us against hastily putting new wine into old 
bottles? To get the new bottles ready is slow work: 
that kind of bottle must grew ; it cannot be made ; and 
in the mean time let us keep our latest vintages in the 
vat till we have some vessel proof against their fer- 
mentation. I know that the hope of any such vessel 
is usually mocked as mere optimism, but I think opti- 
mism is as wise and true as pessimism, or is at least as 
well founded; and since the one can no more establish 
itself as final truth than the other, it is better to have 
optimism. That was always the philosophy of the 
Easy Chair, and I do not know why that should be 
changed. The conditions are not changed." 

There was a silence which neither the Easy Chair 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

nor the unreal editor broke for a while. Then the 
Chair suggested, " I suppose that there is not much 
change in Christmas, at any rate ?" 

" No," said the unreal editor ; " it goes on pretty 
much as it used. The Timminses, who give tiresome 
little dinners which they cannot afford to dull people 
who don't want them, are still alive and miserably bent 
on heaping reluctant beneficiaries with undesired fa- 
vors, and spoiling the simple l pleasure of the time 9 
with the activities of their fatuous vanity. Or per- 
haps you think I ought to bring a hopeful mind even to 
the Timminses V 9 

" I don't see why not," said the Easy Chair. " They 
are not the architects of their own personalities." 

" Ah, take care, take care !" cried the unreal editor. 
" You will be saying next that we are the creatures of 
our environment; that the Timminses would be wiser 
and better if the conditions were not idiotic and per- 
nicious ; and you know what that comes to !" 

" No, I am in no danger of that," the Easy Chair 
retorted. " The Timminses are no such victims of the 
conditions. They are of that vast moderately moneyed 
class who can perfectly well behave with sense if they 
will. Nobody above them or below them asks them to 
be foolish and wasteful." 

" And just now you were making excuses for 
them !" 

" I said they were not the architects of their own 
personalities; but, nevertheless, they are masters of 
themselves. They are really free to leave off giving 
little dinners any day they think so. It should be the 
moralist's business to teach them to think so." 

" And that was what Curtis gladly made his busi- 
ness," the unreal editor somewhat sadly confessed, with 
an unspoken regret for his own difference. More than 



RESTORATION OF THE EASY CHAIR 

once it had seemed to him in considering that rare 
nature that he differed from most reformers chiefly 
in loving the right rather than in hating the wrong; 
in fact, in not hating at all, hut in pitying and ac- 
counting for the wrong as an ancient use corrupted into 
an abuse. Involuntarily the words of the real editor 
in that beautiful tribute to the high soul they were 
praising came to the unreal editor's lips, and he quoted 
aloud to the Easy Chair : " t His love of goodness was 
a passion. He would fain have seen all that was fair 
and good, and he strove to find it so; and, finding it 
otherwise, he strove to make it so. . . . With no heart 
for satire, the discord that fell upon his sensitive ear 
made itself felt in his dauntless comment upon social 
shams and falsehoods. . . . But he was a lover of 
peace, and, ... as he was the ideal gentleman, the 
ideal citizen, he was also the ideal reformer, without 
eccentricity or exaggeration. However high his ideal, 
it never parted company with good sense. He never 
wanted better bread than could be made of wheat, but 
the wheat must be kept good and sound,' and I may 
add," the unreal editor broke off, " that he did not 
hurry the unripe grain to the hopper. He would not 
have sent all the horses at once to the abattoir because 
they made the city noisy and noisome, but would first 
have waited till there were automobiles enough to sup- 
ply their place." 

The Easy Chair caught at the word. " Automo- 
biles ?" it echoed. 

" Ah, I forgot how long you have been stored," said 
the unreal editor, and he explained as well as he could 
the new mode of motion, and how already, with its soft 
rubber galoshes, the automobile had everywhere stolen 
a march upon the iron heels of the horses in the city 
avenues. 

7 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

He fancied the Easy Chair did not understand, quite, 
from the intelligent air with which it eagerly quitted 
the subject. 

" Well," it said at last, " this isn't such a bad time 
to live in, after all, it appears. But for a supreme test 
of your optimism, now, what good can you find to say 
of Christmas ? What sermon could you preach on that 
hackneyed theme which would please the fancy and 
gladden the heart of the readers of a Christmas num- 
ber, where you should make your first appearance in the 
Easy Chair V 

To himself the unreal editor had to own that this 
was a poser. In his heart he was sick of Christmas: 
not of the dear and high event, the greatest in the 
memory of the world, which it records ard embodies, 
but the stale and wearisome Christmas of the Christ- 
mas presents, purchased in rage and bestowed in de- 
spair; the Christmas of Christmas fiction; the Christ- 
mas of heavy Christmas dinners and indigestions; the 
Christmas of all superfluity and surfeit and senti- 
mentality; the Christmas of the Timminses and the 
Tiny Tims. But while he thought of these, by oper- 
ation of the divine law which renders all things sen- 
sible by their opposites, he thought of the other kinds 
of Christmas which can never weary or disgust: the 
Christmas of the little children and the simple- 
hearted and the poor; and suddenly he addressed him- 
self to the Easy Chair with unexpected and surprising 
courage. 

" Why should that be so very difficult ?" he de- 
manded. " If you look at it rightly, Christmas is 
always full of inspiration; and songs as well as ser- 
mons will flow from it till time shall be no more. The 
trouble with us is that we think it is for the pleasure 
of opulent and elderly people, for whom there can be 



RESTORATION OF THE EASY CHAIR 

110 pleasures, but only habits. They are used to having 
everything, and as joy dwells in novelty it has ceased 
to be for them in Christmas gifts and giving and all 
manner of Christmas conventions. But for the young 
to whom these things are new, and for the poor to whom 
they are rare, Christmas and Christmasing are sources 
of perennial happiness. All that you have to do is to 
guard yourself from growing rich and from growing 
old, and then the delight of Christmas is yours for- 
ever. It is not difficult; it is very simple; for even 
if years and riches come upon you in a literal way, 
you can by a little trying keep yourself young and poor 
in spirit. Then you can always rejoice with the in- 
nocent and riot with the destitute. 

" I once knew a father," the unreal editor continued, 
" a most doting and devoted father, who, when he bent 
over the beds of his children to bid them good-night, 
and found them ' high sorrowful and cloyed,' as the 
little ones are apt to be after a hard day's pleasure, 
used to bid them ' Think about Christmas.' If he 
offered this counsel on the night, say, of the 26th of 
December, and they had to look forward to a whole 
year before their hopes of consolation could possibly 
find fruition, they had (as they afterward confessed 
to him) a sense of fatuity if not of mocking in it. 
Even on the Fourth of July, after the last cracker 
had been fired and the last roman candle spent, they 
owned that they had never been able to think about 
Christmas to an extent that greatly assuaged their 
vague regrets. It was not till the following Thanks- 
giving that they succeeded in thinking about Christ- 
mas with anything like the entire cheerfulness expected 
of them." 

" I don't see any application in this homily," said 
the Easv Chair, " or only an application disastrous to 
2 9 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

your imaginable postulate that Christmas is a benefi- 
cent and consolatory factor in our lives." 

" That is because you have not allowed me to con- 
clude," the unreal editor protested, when the Easy 
Chair cut in with, 

" There is nothing I would so willingly allow you 
to do," and " laughed and shook " as if it had been 
" Rabelais's easy chair." 

The unreal editor thought it best to ignore the un- 
timely attempt at wit. " The difficulty in this case 
with both the father and the children was largely tem- 
peramental; but it was chiefly because of a defect in 
their way of thinking about Christmas. It was a very 
ancient error, by no means peculiar to this amiable 
family, and it consisted in thinking about Christmas 
with reference to one's self instead of others." 

"Isn't that rather banal?" the Easy Chair asked. 

" Not at all banal," said the unreal editor, resisting 
an impulse to do the Easy Chair some sort of violence. 
At the same time he made his reflection that if preach- 
ers were criticised in that way to their faces there 
would shortly be very few saints left in the pulpit. 
He gave himself a few moments to recover his temper, 
and then he went on : " If Christmas means anything 
at all, it means anything but one's own pleasure. Up 
to the first Christmas Day the whole world had sup- 
posed that it could be happy selfishly, and its children 
still suppose so. But there is really no such thing as 
selfish, as personal happiness." 

" Tolstoy," the Easy Chair noted. 

" Yes, Tolstoy," the unreal editor retorted. " He 
more than any other has brought us back to the knowl- 
edge of this truth which came into the world with 
Christmas, perhaps because he, more than any other, 
has tried to think and to live Christianity. When 

10 



RESTORATION OF THE EASY CHAIR 

once you have got this vital truth into your mind, the 
whole universe is luminously filled with the possibili- 
ties of impersonal, unselfish happiness. The joy of 
living is suddenly expanded to the dimensions of hu- 
manity, and you can go on taking your pleasure as long 
as there is one unfriended soul and body in the world. 
" It is well to realize this at all times, but it is 
peculiarly fit to do so at Christmas-time, for it is in 
this truth that the worship of Christ begins. Now, too, 
is the best time to give the Divine Word form in deed, 
to translate love into charity. I do not mean only 
the material charity that expresses itself in turkeys and 
plum - puddings for the poor, but also that spiritual 
charity which takes thought how so to amend the sor- 
rowful conditions of civilization that poverty, which 
is the antithesis of fraternity, shall abound less and 
less. 

i Now is the time, now is the time, 
Now is the hour of golden prime' 

for asking one's self, not how much one has given in 
goods or moneys during the past year, but how much 
one has given in thought and. will to remove forever 
the wrong and shame of hopeless need; and to con- 
sider what one may do in the coming year to help put 
the poor lastingly beyond the need of help. 

" To despair of somehow, sometime doing this is to 
sin against the light of Christmas Day, to confess its 
ideal a delusion, its practice a failure. If on no other 
day of all the three hundred and sixty-five, we must 
on this day renew our faith in justice, which is the 
highest mercy." 

The Easy Chair no longer interrupted, and the un- 
real editor, having made his point, went on after the 
manner of preachers, when they are also editors, to 

11 



IMAGINAEY D1TEKVIEWS 

make it over again, and to repeat himself pitilessly, 
unsparingly. He did not observe that the Easy Chair 
had shrunk forward until all its leathern seat was 
wrinkled and its carven top was bent over its old red 
back. When he stopped at last, the warehouse agent 
asked in whisper, 

" What do you want done with it, sir ?" 
" Oh," said the unreal editor, " send it back to 
Franklin Square •' ; and then, with a sudden realization 
of the fact, he softly added, " Don't wake it." 

There in Franklin Square, still dreaming, it was 
set up in the rear of the magazine, where it has be- 
come not only the place, but the stuff of dreams such 
as men are made of. From month to month, ever since, 
its reveries, its illusions, which some may call de- 
liverances, have gone on with more and more a dis- 
position to dramatize themselves. It has seemed to 
the occupant of the Easy Chair, at times, as if he had 
suffered with it some sort of land-change from a sole 
entity to a multiple personality in which his several 
selves conversed with one another, and came and went 
unbidden. At first, after a moment of question whether 
his imagination was not frequented by the phantoms 
of delight which in the flesh had formerly filled his 
place, whether the spirits which haunted him in it 
were not those of Mitchell, of Curtis, of Aldrich, he 
became satisfied from their multitude and nature that 
they were the subdivisions of his own ego, and as such 
he has more and more frankly treated them. 



II 

A YEAR OF SPRING AND A LIFE OF YOUTH 

Oi^ one of those fine days which the April of the 
other year meanly grudged us, a poet, flown with the 
acceptance of a quarter-page lyric by the real editor in 
the Study next door, came into the place where the Easy 
Chair sat rapt in the music of the elevated trains and 
the vision of the Brooklyn Bridge towers. " Era la 
stagione nella quale la rivestita terra, piu che tutto 
P altro anno, si mostra bella," he said, without other 
salutation, throwing his soft gray hat on a heap of 
magazines and newspapers in the corner, and finding 
what perch he could for himself on the window-sill. 

" What is that ?" he of the Easy Chair gruffly de- 
manded ; he knew perfectly well, but he liked marring 
the bloom on a fellow-creature's joy by a show of savage 
ignorance. 

" It's the divine beginning of Boccaccio's ' Eiam- 
metta,' it is the very soul of spring; and it is so in- 
alienably of Boccaccio's own time and tongue and sun 
and air that there is no turning it into the lan- 
guage of another period or climate. What would you 
find to thrill you in, l It was the season in which the 
reapparelled earth, more than in all the other year, 
shows herself fair ' ? The rhythm is lost ; the flow, 
sweet as the first runnings of the maple where the wood- 
pecker has tapped it, stiffens into sugar, the liquid form 

13 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

is solidified into the cake adulterated with glucose, and 
sold for a cent as the pure Vermont product." 

As he of the Easy Chair could not deny this, he 
laughed recklessly. " I understood what your passage 
from Boccaccio meant, and why you came in here 
praising spring in its words. You are happy because 
you have sold a poem, probably for more than it is 
worth. But why do you praise spring? What do you 
fellows do it for ? You know perfectly well that it is 
the most capricious, the most treacherous, the most de- 
lusive, deadly, slatternly, down - at - heels, milkmaid- 
handed season of the year, without decision of char- 
acter or fixed principles, and with only the vaguest 
raw-girlish ideals, a red nose between crazy smiles and 
streaming eyes. If it did not come at the end of win- 
ter, when people are glad of any change, nobody could 
endure it, and it would be cast neck and crop out of 
the calendar. Fancy spring coming at the end of sum- 
mer ! It would not be tolerated for a moment, with 
the contrast of its crude, formless beauty and the ripe 
loveliness of August. Every satisfied sense of hap- 
piness, secure and established, would be insulted by 
its haphazard promises made only to be broken. 
i Rather,' the outraged mortal would say, ' the last 
tender hours of autumn, the first deathful - thrilling 
snowfall, with all the thoughts of life wandering flake- 
like through the dim air — rather these than the re- 
currence of those impulses and pauses, those kisses 
frozen on the lips, those tender rays turning to the 
lash of sleet across the face of nature. No, the only 
advantage spring can claim over her sister seasons is 
her novelty, the only reason she can offer for being the 
spoiled child of the poets is that nobody but the poets 
could keep on fancying that there was any longer the 

least originality in her novelty." 

14 



A YEAR OF SPRING 

The poet attempted to speak, in the little stop he of 
the Easy Chair made for taking breath, but he was 
not suffered to do so. 

" Every atom of originality has been drained from 
the novelty of spring ' in the process of the suns/ and 
science is rapidly depriving her even of novelty. What 
was once supposed to be the spring grass has been found 
to be nothing but the fall grass, with the green stealing 
back into the withered blades. As for the spring lamb 
which used to crop the spring grass, it is now out of 
the cold-storage where the spring chicken and the new- 
laid eggs of yesteryear come from. It is said that 
there are no birds in last year's nests, but probably a 
careful examination would discover a plentiful hatch 
of nestlings which have hibernated in the habitations 
popularly supposed to be deserted the June before this. 
Early spring vegetables are in market throughout the 
twelvemonth, and spring flowers abound at the florists' 
in December and January. There is no reason why 
spring should not be absorbed into winter and summer 
by some such partition as took place politically in the 
case of Poland. Like that unhappy kingdom, she has 
abused her independence and become a molestation and 
discomfort to the annual meteorology. As a season 
she is distinctly a failure, being neither one thing nor 
the other, neither hot nor cold, a very Laodicean. Her 
winds were once supposed to be very siccative, and 
peculiarly useful in drying the plaster in new houses; 
but now the contractors put in radiators as soon as the 
walls are up, and the work is done much better. As 
for the germinative force of her suns, in these days of 
intensive farming, when electricity is applied to the 
work once done by them, they can claim to have no 
virtue beyond the suns of July or August, which most 
seeds find effective enough. If spring were absorbed 

15 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

into summer, the heat of that season would be qualified, 
and its gentler warmth would be extended to autumn, 
which would be prolonged into the winter. The rigors 
of winter would be much abated, and the partition of 
spring among the other seasons would perform the 
mystic office of the Gulf Stream in ameliorating our 
climate, besides ridding us of a time of most tedious 
and annoying suspense. And what should we lose 
by it?" 

The poet seemed not to be answering the Easy Chair 
directly, but only to be murmuring to himself, 
" Youth." 

" Youth ! Youth !" the Easy Chair repeated in ex- 
asperation. " And what is youth V 

" The best thing in the world." 

" For whom is it the best thing V 

This question seemed to give the poet pause. 
" Well," he said, finally, with a not very forcible smile, 
" for itself." 

" Ah, there you are !" he of the Easy Chair ex- 
claimed ; but he could not help a forgiving laugh. " In 
a way you are right. The world belongs to youth, and 
so it ought to be the best thing for itself in it. Youth 
is a very curious thing, and in that it is like spring, 
especially like the spring we have just been having, to 
our cost. It is the only period of life, as spring is the 
only season of the year, that has too much time on its 
hands. Yet it does not seem to waste time, as age 
does, as winter does; it keeps doing something all the 
while. The things it does are apparently very futile 
and superfluous, some of them, but in the end some- 
thing has been accomplished. After a March of whim- 
sical suns and snows, an April of quite fantastical 
frosts and thaws, and a May, at least partially, of cold 
mists and parching winds, the flowers, which the flor- 

16 



A YEAE OF SPRING 

ists have been forcing for the purpose, are blooming 
in the park; the grass is green wherever it has not had 
the roots trodden out of it, and a filmy foliage, like the 
soft foulard tissues which the young girls are wearing, 
drips from the trees. You can say it is all very painty, 
the verdure; too painty; but you cannot reject the pict- 
ure because of this little mannerism of the painter. 
To be sure, you miss the sheeted snows and the dreamy 
weft of leafless twigs against the hard, blue sky. Still, 
now it has come, you cannot deny that the spring is 
pretty, or that the fashionable colors which it has intro- 
duced are charming. It is said that these are so charm- 
ing that a woman of the worst taste cannot choose amiss 
among them. In spite of her taste, her hat comes out a 
harmonic miracle ; her gown, against all her endeavors, 
flows in an exquisite symphony of the tender audacities 
of tint with which nature mixes her palette ; little notes 
of chiffon, of tulle, of feather, blow all about her. 
This is rather a medley of metaphors, to which several 
arts contribute, but you get my meaning ?" In making 
this appeal, he of the Easy Chair saw in the fixed eye 
of the poet that remoteness of regard which denotes 
that your listener has been hearing very little of what 
you have been saying. 

" Yes," the poet replied with a long breath, " you 
are right about that dreamy weft of leafless twigs 
against the hard, blue sky; and I wonder if we quite do 
justice to the beauty of winter, of age, we poets, when 
we are so glad to have the spring come." 

" I don't know about winter," he of the Easy Chair 
said, " but in an opera which the English Lord Cham- 
berlain provisionally suppressed, out of tenderness for 
an alliance not eventually or potentially to the advan- 
tage of these States, Mr. William Gilbert has done his 
duty to the decline of life, where he sin<?s, 

17 



IMAGINAKY INTEKVIEWS 

' There is beauty in extreme old age ; 
There's a fascination frantic 
In a ruin that's romantic' 

Or, at least no one else has said so much for ' that time 
of life/ which another librettist has stigmatized as 

' Bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.' " 

" Yes, I know," the poet returned, clinging to the 
thread of thought on which he had cast himself loose. 
" But I believe a great deal more could be said for 
age by the poets if they really tried. I am not satisfied 
of Mr. Gilbert's earnestness in the passage you quote 
from the ' Mikado/ and I prefer Shakespeare's ( bare, 
ruined choirs.' I don't know but I prefer the hard, 
unflattering portrait which Hamlet mockingly draws 
for Polonius, and there is something almost caressing 
in the notion of ' the lean and slippered pantaloon.' 
The worst of it is that we old fellows look so plain to 
one another; I dare say young people don't find us 
so bad. I can remember from my own youth that I 
thought old men, and especially old women, rather at- 
tractive. I am not sure that we elders realize the 
charm of a perfectly bald head as it presents itself to 
the eye of youth. Yet, an infant's head is often quite 
bald." 

" Yes, and so is an egg, ,y the Easy Chair retorted, 
" but there is not the same winning appeal in the bald- 
ness of the superannuated bird which has evolved from 
it — eagle or nightingale, parrot or 

Many-wintered crow that leads the clanging rookery home. 

Tennyson has done his best in showing us venerable in 
his picture of 

18 



A YEAR OF SPRING 

'the Ionian father of the rest: 
A million wrinkles carved his silver skin, 
A hundred winters snowed upon his breast.' 



But who would not rather be Helen than Homer, her 
face launching a thousand ships and burning the top- 
less tower of Ilion — fairer than the evening air and 
simply but effectively attired in the beauty of a thou- 
sand stars ? What poet has ever said things like that 
of an old man, even of Methuselah?" 

" Yes/' the poet sighed. " I suppose you are partly 
right. Meteorology certainly has the advantage of hu- 
manity in some things. We cannot make much of age 
here, and hereafter we can only conceive of its being 
turned, into youth. Fancy an eternity of sensibility !" 

" No, I would rather not !" he of the Easy Chair 
returned, sharply. " Besides, it is you who are trying 
to make age out a tolerable, even a desirable thing." 

" But I have given it up," the poet meekly replied. 
11 The great thing would be some rearrangement of our 
mortal conditions so that once a year we could wake 
from our dream of winter and find ourselves young. 
Not merely younger, but young — the genuine article. 
A tree can do that, and does it every year, until after 
a hundred years, or three hundred, or a thousand, it 
dies. Why should not a man, or, much more impor- 
tantly, a woman, do it? I think we are very much 
scanted in that respect." 

" My dear fellow, if you begin fault-finding with 
creation, there will be no end to it. It might be an- 
swered that, in this case, you can walk about and a 
tree cannot; you can call upon me and a tree cannot. 
And other things. Come ! the trees have not got it all 
their own way. Besides, imagine the discomforts of 

a human springtime, blowing hot and blowing cold, 

19 



IMAGINARY INTEBVIEWS 

freezing, thawing, raining, and drouthing, and never 
being sure whether we are young or old, May or De- 
cember. We should be such nuisances to one another 
that we should ask the gods to take back their gift, and 
you know very well they cannot." 

" Our rejuvenescence would be a matter of temper- 
ament, not temperature," the poet said, searching the 
air hopefully for an idea. " I have noticed this spring 
that the isothermal line is as crooked as a railroad on 
the map of a rival. I have been down in New Hamp- 
shire since I saw you, and I found the spring temper- 
amentally as far advanced there as here in New York. 
Of course not as far advanced as in Union Square, 
but quite as far as in Central Park. Between Boston 
and Portsmouth there were bits of railroad bank that 
were as green as the sward beside the Mall, and every 
now and then there was an enthusiastic maple in the 
wet lowlands that hung the air as full of color as any 
maple that reddened the flying landscape when I first 
got beyond the New York suburbs on my way north. 
At Portsmouth the birds were singing the same songs 
as in the Park. I could not make out the slightest 
difference." 

" With the same note of nervous apprehension in 
them V 9 

" I did not observe that. But they were spring songs, 
certainly." 

" Then," the Easy Chair said, " I would rather my 
winter were turned into summer, or early autumn, 
than spring, if there is going to be any change of the 
mortal conditions. I like settled weather, the calm 
of that time of life when the sins and follies have been 
committed, the passions burned themselves out, and the 
ambitions frustrated so that they do not bother, the as- 
pirations defeated, the hopes brought low. Then you 

20 



A YEAR OF SPRING 

have some comfort. This turmoil of vernal striving 
makes me tired." 

" Yes, I see what you mean," the poet assented. 
" But you cannot have the seasons out of their order 
in the rearrangement of the mortal conditions. You 
must have spring and you must have summer before 
you can have autumn." 

" Are those the terms ? Then I say, Winter at once ! 
Winter is bad enough, but I would not go through 
spring again for any — In winter you can get away 
from the cold, with a good, warm book, or a sunny 
picture, or a cozy old song, or a new play ; but in spring 
how will you escape the rawness if you have left off 
your flannels and let out the furnace? No, my dear 
friend, we could not stand going back to youth every 
year. The trees can, because they have been used to 
it from the beginning of time, but the men could not. 
Even the women — " 

At this moment a beatific presence made itself 
sensible, and the Easy Chair recognized the poet's 
Muse, who had come for him. The poet put the ques- 
tion to her. " Young ?" she said. " Why, you and I 
are always young, silly boy! Get your hat, and come 
over to Long Island City with me, and see the pussy- 
willows along the railroad-banks. The mosquitoes are 
beginning to sing in the ditches already." 



Ill 

SCLEROSIS OF THE TASTES 

The other day one of those convertible familiars of 
the Easy Chair, who 

" Change and pass and come again," 

looked in upon it, after some months' absence, with 
the effect of having aged considerably in the interval. 
But this was only his latest avatar; he was no older, 
as he was no younger, than before; to support a fresh 
character, he had to put on an appropriate aspect, and 
having, at former interviews, been a poet, a novelist, a 
philosopher, a reformer, a moralist, he was now merely 
looking the part of a veteran observer, of a psychol- 
ogist grown gray in divining the character of others 
from his own consciousness. 

" Have you ever noticed," he began, " that the first 
things we get stiff in, as we advance in life, are our 
tastes? We suppose that it is our joints which feel 
the premonitions of age ; and that because we no longer 
wish to dance or play ball or sprint in college races 
we are in the earliest stage of that sapless condition 
when the hinges of the body grind dryly upon one an- 
other, and we lose a good inch of our stature, through 
shrinkage, though the spine still holds us steadfastly 
upright." 

22 



SCLEKOSIS OF THE TASTES 

"Well, isn't that so?" the Easy Chair asked, 
tranquilly. 

" It may be so, or it may not be so," the veteran 
observer replied. " Ultimately, I dare say, it is so. 
But what I wish to enforce is the fact that before you 
begin to feel the faintest sense of stiffening joints you 
are allowing yourself to fall into that voluntary senes- 
cence which I call getting stiff in the tastes. It is 
something that I think we ought to guard ourselves 
against as a sort of mental sclerosis which must end 
fatally long before we have reached the patriarchal 
age which that unbelieving believer Metchnikoff says 
we can attain if we fight off physical sclerosis. He 
can only negatively teach us how to do this, but I main- 
tain we can have each of us in our power the remedy 
against stiffening tastes." 

" I don't see how," the Easy Chair said, more to 
provoke the sage to explanation than to express dissent. 

" I will teach you how," he said, " if you will allow 
me to make it a personal matter, and use you in illus- 
tration." 

" Why not use yourself ?" 

" Because that would be egotistical, and the prime 
ingredient of my specific against getting stiff in the 
tastes is that spiritual grace which is the very anti- 
dote, the very antithesis of egotism. Up to a certain 
point, a certain time, we are usefully employed in 
cultivating our tastes, in refining them, and in denning 
them. We cannot be too strenuous in defining them; 
and, as long as we are young, the catholicity of youth 
will preserve us from a bigoted narrowness. In aes- 
thetic matters — and I imagine we both understand that 
we are dealing with these — the youngest youth has no 
tastes; it has merely appetites. All is fish that comes 
to its net; if anything, it prefers the gaudier of the 

23 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

finny tribes; it is only when it becomes sophisticated 
that its appetites turn into tastes, and it begins to 
appreciate the flavor of that diseased but pearl-bearing 
species of oyster which we call genius, because we have 
no accurate name for it. With the appreciation of this 
flavor comes the overpowering desire for it, the inces- 
sant and limitless search for it. To the desire for it 
whole literatures owe their continued existence, since, 
except for the universal genius-hunger of youth, the 
classics of almost all languages would have perished 
long ago. When indiscriminate and omnivorous youth 
has explored those vast and mostly lifeless seas, it has 
found that the diseased oyster which bears the pearls 
is the rarest object in nature. But having once formed 
the taste for it, youth will have no other flavor, and it 
is at this moment that its danger of hardening into 
premature age begins. The conceit of having recog- 
nized genius takes the form of a bigoted denial of its 
existence save in the instances recognized. This con- 
ceit does not admit the possibility of error or omission 
in the search, and it does not allow that the diseased 
oyster can transmit its pearl-bearing qualities and its 
peculiar flavors ; so that the attitude of aging youth, in 
the stiffening of its tastes, is one of rejection toward 
all new bivalves, or, not to be tediously metaphorical, 
books." 

The veteran observer fell silent at this point, and 
the Easy Chair seized the occasion to remark : " Yes, 
there is something in what you say. But this stiffening 
of the tastes, this sclerosis of the mind, is hardly an 
infectious disease — " 

" Ah, but it is infectious," the veteran observer ex- 
claimed, rousing himself, " infections as far as the 
victim can possibly make it so. He wishes nothing 
so much as to impart his opinions in all their rigid- 

24 



SCLEKOSIS OF THE TASTES 

ity to everybody else. Take your own case, for in- 
stance — " 

" No, we would rather not," the Easy Chair inter- 
posed. 

" But you must make the sacrifice," the veteran ob- 
server persisted. " You will allow that you are ex- 
tremely opinionated ?" 

" Not at all." 

" Well, then, that you are devoutly conscientious in 
the tenure of your aesthetic beliefs ?" 

" Something like that, yes." 

" And you cannot deny that in times past you have 
tried your best to make others think with you?" 

" It was our duty." 

" Well, let it pass for that. It amounted to an ef- 
fort to make your mental sclerosis infectious, and it 
was all the worse because, in you, the stiffening of the 
tastes had taken the form of aversions rather than 
preferences. You did not so much wish your readers 
to like your favorite authors as to hate all the others. 
At the time when there was a fad for making lists of 
The Hundred Best Authors, I always wondered that 
you didn't put forth some such schedule." 

" We had the notion of doing something of the kind," 
the Easy Chair confessed, " but we could not think of 
more than ten or a dozen really first-rate authors, and 
if we had begun to compile a list of the best authors 
Ave should have had to leave out most of their works. 
Nearly all the classics would have gone by the board. 
What havoc we should have made with the BritisJi 
poets ! The Elizabethan dramatists would mostly have 
fallen under the ban of our negation, to a play, if not 
to a man. Chaucer, but for a few poems, is impossible ; 
Spenser's poetry is generally duller than the Presi- 
dents' messages before Mr. Roosevelt's time; Milton 
3 25 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

is a trial of the spirit in three-fourths of his verse; 
Wordsworth is only not so bad as Byron, who thought 
him so much worse; Shakespeare himself, when he is 
reverently supposed not to be Shakespeare, is reading 
for martyrs; Dante's science and politics outweigh his 
poetry a thousandfold, and so on through the whole 
catalogue. Among the novelists — " 

" No, don't begin on the novelists ! Every one knows 
your heresies there, and would like to burn you along 
with the romances which I've no doubt you would still 
commit to the flames. I see you are the Bourbon of 
criticism ; you have learned nothing and forgotten noth- 
ing. But why don't you turn your adamantine im- 
mutability to some practical account, and give the 
world a list of The Hundred Worst Books?" 

" Because a hundred books out of the worst would 
be a drop out of the sea; there would remain an im- 
measurable welter of badness, of which we are now 
happily ignorant, and from which we are safe, as long 
as our minds are not turned to it by examples." 

" Ah," our visitor said, " I see that you are afraid 
to confess yourself the popular failure as a critic which 
you are. You are afraid that if you made a list of 
The Hundred Worst Books you would send the classes 
to buying them in the most expensive binding, and the 
masses to taking them out of all the public libraries." 

" There is something in what you say," the Easy 
Chair confessed. " Our popular failure as a critic is 
notorious ; it cannot be denied. The stamp of our dis- 
approval at one time gave a whole order of fiction a 
currency that was not less than torrential. The flood 
of romantic novels which passed over the land, and 
which is still to be traced in the tatters of the rag-doll 
heroes and heroines caught in the memories of readers 
along its course, was undoubtedly the effect of our 

26 



SCLEROSIS OF THE TASTES 

adverse criticism. No, we could not in conscience com- 
pile and publish a list of The Hundred Worst Books; 
it would be contrary, for the reasons you give, to public 
morals." 

" And don't you think," the observer said, with a 
Soeratic subtlety that betrayed itself in his gleaming 
eye, in the joyous hope of seeing his victim fall into the 
pit that his own admissions had digged for him, " and 
don't you think that it would also bring to you the 
unpleasant consciousness of having stiffened in your 
tastes ?" 

" It might up to a certain point," we consented. 
" But we should prefer to call it confirmed in our 
convictions. Wherever we have liked or disliked in 
literature it has been upon grounds hardly distinguish- 
able from moral grounds. Bad art is a vice; untruth 
to nature is the eighth of the seven deadly sins ; a false 
school in literature is a seminary of crime. We are 
speaking largely, of course — " 

" It certainly sounds ralher tall," our friend sar- 
castically noted, " and it sounds very familiar." 

" Yes," we went on, u all the ascertained veracities 
are immutable. One holds to them, or, rather, they hold 
to one, with an indissoluble tenacity. But convictions 
are in the region of character and are of remote origin. 
In their safety one indulges one's self in expectations, in 
tolerances, and these rather increase with the lapse of 
time. We should say that your theory of the stiffening 
tastes is applicable to the earlier rather than the later 
middle life. We should say that the tastes if they 
stiffen at the one period limber at the other; their 
forbidding rigidity is succeeded by an acquiescent sup- 
pleness. One is aware of an involuntary hospitality 
toward a good many authors whom one would once have 
turned destitute from the door, or with a dole of Or- 

27 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

ganized Charity meal-tickets at the best. But in that 
inaturer time one hesitates, and possibly ends by ask- 
ing the stranger in, especially if he is young, or even 
if he is merely new, and setting before him the cold 
potato of a qualified approval. One says to him : i You 
know I don't think you are the real thing quite, but 
taking you on your own ground you are not so bad. 
Come, you shall have a night's lodging at least, and if 
you improve, if you show a tendency to change in the 
right direction, there is no telling but you may be al- 
lowed to stay the week. But you must not presume; 
you must not take this frosty welcome for an effect of 
fire from the hearth where we sit with our chosen 
friends.' Ten to one the stranger does not like this 
sort of talk, and goes his way — the wrong way. But, 
at any rate, one has shown an open mind, a liberal 
spirit; one has proved that one has not stiffened in 
one's tastes; that one can make hopeful allowances in 
hopeful cases." 

" Such as ?" the observer insinuated. 

" Such as do not fit the point exactly. Very likely 
the case may be that of an old or elderly author. It 
has been only within a year or two that we have formed 
the taste for an English writer, no longer living, save 
in his charming books. James Payn was a favorite 
with many in the middle Victorian period, but it is 
proof of the flexibility of our tastes that we have only 
just come to him. After shunning Anthony Trollope 
for fifty years, we came to him, almost as with a rush, 
long after our half-century was past. Now, James 
Payn is the solace of our autumnal equinox, and 
Anthony Trollope we read with a constancy and a re- 
currence surpassed only by our devotion to the truth 
as it is in the fiction of the Divine Jane; and Jane 
Austen herself was not an idol of our first or even our 

28 



SCLEEOSIS OF THE TASTES 

second youth, but became the cult of a time when if 
our tastes had stiffened we could have cared only for 
the most modern of the naturalists, and those prefer- 
ably of the Eussian and Spanish schools. A signal 
proof of their continued suppleness came but the other 
day when we acquainted ourselves with the work of the 
English novelist, Mr. Percy White, and it was the more 
signal because we perceived that he had formed him- 
self upon a method of Thackeray's, which recalled that 
master, as the occasional aberrations of Payn and Trol- 
lope recall a manner of him. But it is Thackeray's 
most artistic method which Mr. White recalls in his 
studies of scamps and snobs ; he allows them, as Thack- 
eray allows Barry Lyndon and the rest, to tell their 
own stories, and in their unconsciousness of their own 
natures he finds play for an irony as keen and graphic 
as anything in fiction. He deals with the actual Eng- 
lish world, and the pleasure he gave us was such as 
to make us resolve to return to Thackeray's vision of 
his own contemporaneous English world at the first 
opportunity. We have not done so yet; but after we 
have fortified ourselves with a course of Scott and 
Dickens, we are confident of being able to bear up 
under the heaviest-handed satire of Va?iity Fair. As 
for The Luck of Barry Lyndon and The Yellowplush 
Papers, and such like, they have never ceased to have 
their prime delight for us. But their proportion is 
quite large enough to survive from any author for any 
reader; as we are often saying, it is only in bits that 
authors survive ; their resurrection is not by the whole 
body, but here and there a perfecter fragment. Most 
of our present likes and dislikes are of the period 
when you say people begin to stiffen in their tastes. 
We could count the authors by the score who have be- 
come our favorites in that period, and those we have 

29 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

dropped are almost as many. It is not necessary to say 
who they all are, but we may remark that we still read, 
and read, and read again the poetry of Keats, and that 
we no longer read the poetry of Alexander Smith. 
But it is through the growth of the truly great upon 
his mature perception that the aging reader finds novel 
excellences in them. It was only the other day that 
we picked up Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, and real- 
ized in it, from a chance page or two, a sardonic 
quality of insurpassable subtlety and reach. This 
was something quite new to us in it. We had 
known the terrible pathos of the story, its immeasur- 
able tragedy, but that deadly, quiet, pitiless, freezing 
irony of a witness holding himself aloof from its course, 
and losing, for that page or two, the moralist in the 
mere observer, was a revelation that had come to that 
time of life in us when you think the tastes stiffen 
and one refuses new pleasures because they are new." 

Our visitor yawned visibly, audibly. " And what 
is all this you have been saying? You have made 
yourself out an extraordinary example of what may be 
done by guarding against the stiffening of the tastes 
after the end of second youth. But have you proved 
that there is no such danger ? Or was your idea simply 
to celebrate yourself? At moments I fancied some- 
thing like that." 

We owned the stroke with an indulgent smile. " No, 
not exactly that. The truth is we have been very much 
interested by your notion — if it was yours, which is 
not altogether probable — and we have been turning its 
light upon our own experience, in what we should not 
so much call self-celebration as self-exploitation. One 
uses one's self as the stuff for knowledge of others, or 
for the solution of any given problem. There is no 
other way of getting at the answers to the questions." 

30 



SCLEROSIS OF THE TASTES 

" And what is your conclusion as to my notion, if 
it is mine ?" the veteran observer asked, with su- 
periority. 

" That there is nothing in it. The fact is that the 
tastes are never so tolerant, so liberal, so generous, so 
supple as they are at that time of life when they begin, 
according to your notion, to stiffen, to harden, to con- 
tract. We have in this very period formed a new 
taste — or taken a new lease of an old one — for reading 
history, which had been dormant all through our first 
and second youth. We expect to see the time when 
we shall read the Elizabethan dramatists with avidity. 
We may not improbably find a delight in statistics; 
there must be a hidden charm in them. We may even 
form a relish for the vagaries of pseudo-psychology — " 

At this point we perceived the veteran observer had 
vanished and that we were talking to ourselves. 



IV 

THE PRACTICES AND PRECEPTS OF VAUDEVILLE 

A friend of the Easy Chair came in the other day 
after a frost from the magazine editor which had 
nipped a tender manuscript in its bloom, and was re- 
ceived with the easy hospitality we are able to show 
the rejected from a function involving neither power 
nor responsibility. 

" Ah !" we breathed, sadly, at the sight of the wilted 
offering in the hands of our friend. " What is it he 
won't take now ?" 

" Wait till I get my second wind," the victim of 
unrequited literature answered, dropping into the Easy 
Chair, from which the occupant had risen; and he 
sighed, pensively, " I felt so sure I had got him this 
time." He closed his eyes, and leaned his head back 
against the uncomfortably carven top of the Easy Chair. 
It was perhaps his failure to find rest in it that restored 
him to animation. " It is a little thing," he murmured, 
" on the decline of the vaudeville." 

" The decline of the vaudeville ?" we repeated, 
wrinkling our forehead in grave misgiving. Then, 
for want of something better, we asked, " Do you think 
that is a very dignified subject for the magazine?" 

" Why, bless my soul !" the rejected one cried, start- 
ing somewhat violently forward, " what is your maga- 
zine itself but vaudeville, with your contributors all 
doing their stunts of fiction, or poetry, or travel, or 

32 



THE PRACTICES OF VAUDEVILLE 

sketches of life, or articles of popular science and so- 
ciological interest, and I don't know what all ! What 
are your illustrations but the moving pictures of the 
kalatechnoscope ! Why," he said, with inspiration, 
" what are you yourself but a species of Chaser that 
comes at the end of the show, and helps clear the ground 
for the next month's performance by tiring out the 
lingering readers V 

" You don't think," we suggested, " you're being 
rather unpleasant ?" 

Our friend laughed harshly, and we were glad to 
see him restored to so much cheerfulness, at any rate. 
" I think the notion is a pretty good fit, though if you 
don't like to wear it I don't insist. Why should you 
object to being likened to those poor fellows who come 
last on the programme at the vaudeville ? Very often 
they are as good as the others, and sometimes, when I 
have determined to get my five hours' enjoyment to the 
last moment before six o'clock, I have had my reward 
in something unexpectedly delightful in the work of the 
Chasers. I have got into close human relations with 
them, I and the half-dozen brave spirits who have 
stuck it out with me, while the ushers went impatiently 
about, clacking the seats back, and picking up the pro- 
grammes and lost articles under them. I have had the 
same sense of kindly comradery with you, and now 
and then my patience has been rewarded by you, just 
as it has been by the Chasers at the vaudeville, and 
I've said so to people. I've said : ' You're wrong to put 
down the magazine the way most of you do before you 
get to those departments at the end. Sometimes there 
are quite good things in them.' " 

" Eeally," said the unreal editor, " you seem to have 
had these remarks left over from your visit to the real 
editor. We advise vou to go back and repeat them. 

33 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

They may cause him to revise his opinion of your con- 
tribution." 

" It's no use my going back. I read finality in his 
eye before I left him, and I feel that no compliment, 
the most fulsome, would move him. Don't turn me 
out! I take it all back about your being a Chaser. 
You are the first act on the bill for me. I read the 
magazine like a Chinese book — from the back. I al- 
ways begin with the Easy Chair." 

" Ah, now you are talking," we said, and we thought 
it no more than human to ask, " What is it you have 
been saying about the vaudeville, anyway?" 

The rejected one instantly unfolded his manuscript. 
" I will just read—" 

" No, no !" we interposed. " Tell us about it — give 
us the general drift. We never can follow anything 
read to us." 

The other looked incredulous, but he was not master 
of the situation, and he resigned himself to the sec- 
ondary pleasure of sketching the paper he would so 
much rather have read. 

" Why, you know what an inveterate vaudeville- 
goer I have always been V 9 

We nodded. " We know how you are always try- 
ing to get us to neglect the masterpieces of our un- 
dying modern dramatists, on the legitimate stage, and 
go with you to see the ridiculous stunts you de- 
light in." 

" Well, it comes to the same thing. I am an in- 
veterate vaudeville-goer, for the simple reason that I 
find better acting in the vaudeville, and better drama, 
on the whole, than you ever get, or you generally get, 
on your legitimate stage. I don't know why it is so 
very legitimate. I have no doubt but the vaudeville, 
or continuous variety performance, is the older, the 

34 



THE PRACTICES OF VAUDEVILLE 

more authentic form of histrionic art. Before the 
Greek dramatists, or the longer-winded Sanskrit play- 
wrights, or the exquisitely conventionalized Chinese 
and Japanese and Javanese were heard of, it is prob- 
able that there were companies of vaudeville artists 
going about the country and doing the turns that they 
had invented themselves, and getting and giving the 
joy that comes of voluntary and original work, just as 
they are now. And in the palmiest days of the Greek 
tragedy or the Roman comedy, there were, of course, 
variety shows all over Athens and Rome where you 
could have got twice the amusement for half the money 
that you would at the regular theatres. While the 
openly wretched and secretly rebellious actors whom 
Euripides and Terence had cast for their parts were 
going through roles they would never have chosen them- 
selves, the wilding heirs of art at the vaudeville were 
giving things of their own imagination, which they had 
worked up from some vague inspiration into a sketch 
of artistic effect. No manager had foisted upon them 
his ideals of 'what the people wanted,' none had 
shaped their performance according to his own notion 
of histrionics. They had each come to him with his or 
her little specialty, that would play fifteen or twenty 
minutes, and had, after trying it before him, had it 
rejected or accepted in its entirety. Then, author and 
actor in one, they had each made his or her appeal to 
the public." • 

" There were no hers on the stage in those days," we 
interposed. 

" "No matter," the rejected contributor retorted. 
" There are now, and that is the important matter. 
I am coming to the very instant of actuality, to the 
show which I saw yesterday, and which I should have 
brought my paper down to mention if it had been ac- 

35 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

cepted." He drew a long breath, and said, with a 
dreamy air of retrospect : " It is all of a charming 
unity, a tradition unbroken from the dawn of civil- 
ization. When I go to a variety show, and drop my 
ticket into the chopping-box at the door, and fastidi- 
ously choose my unreserved seat in the best place I 
can get, away from interposing posts and persons, and 
settle down to a long afternoon's delight, I like to fancy 
myself a far-fetched phantom of the past, who used to 
do the same thing at Thebes or Nmeveh as many 
thousand years ago as you please. I like to think that 
I too am an unbroken tradition, and my pleasure will 
be such as shaped smiles immemorially gone to 
dust." 

We made our reflection that this passage was prob- 
ably out of the rejected contribution, but we did not 
say anything, and our visitor went on. 

" And what a lot of pleasure I did get, yesterday, for 
my fifty cents ! There were twelve stunts on the bill, 
not counting the kalatechnoscope, and I got in before 
the first was over, so that I had the immediate ad- 
vantage of seeing a gifted fellow-creature lightly swing- 
ing himself between two chairs which had their outer 
legs balanced on the tops of caraffes full of water, and 
making no more of the feat than if it were a walk in 
the Park or down Fifth Avenue. How I respected that 
man! What study had gone to the perfection of that 
act, and the others that he equally made nothing of! 
He was simply billed as ' Equilibrist,' when his name 
ought to have been blazoned in letters a foot high if 
they were in any wise to match his merit. He was 
followed by l Twin Sisters,' who, as ( Refined Singers 
and Dancers,' appeared in sweeping confections of 
white silk, with deeply drooping, widely spreading 

white hats, and long-fringed white parasols heaped with 

36 



THE PRACTICES OF VAUDEVILLE 

artificial roses, and sang a little tropical romance, whose 
burden was 

' Under the bamboo-tree/ 

brought in at unexpected intervals. They also danced 
this romance with languid undulations, and before you 
could tell how or why, they had disappeared and re- 
appeared in short green skirts, and then shorter white 
skirts, with steps and stops appropriate to their cos- 
tumes, but always, I am bound to say, of the refine- 
ment promised. I can't tell you in what their refine- 
ment consisted, but I am sure it was there, just as I 
am sure of the humor of the two brothers who next 
appeared as ' Singing and Dancing Comedians ' of the 
coon type. I know that they sang and they danced, 
and worked sable pleasantries upon one another with 
the help of the pianist, who often helps out the dialogue 
of the stage in vaudeville. They were not so good as 
the next people, a jealous husband and a pretty wife, 
who seized every occasion in the slight drama of ' The 
Singing Lesson,' and turned it to account in giving 
their favorite airs. I like to have a husband disguise 
himself as a German maestro, and musically make out 
why his wife is so zealous in studying with him, and 
I dc not mind in the least having the sketch close with- 
out reason: it leaves something to my imagination. 
Two of ' America's Leading Ban joists ' charmed me 
next, for, after all, there is nothing like the banjo. 
If one does not one's self rejoice in its plunking, there 
are others who do, and that is enough for my altruistic 
spirit. Besides, it is America's leading instrument, 
and those who excel upon it appeal to the patriotism 
which is never really dormant in us. Its close asso- 
ciation with color in our civilization seemed to render 
it the fitting prelude of the next act, which consisted 

37 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

of ' Monologue and Songs ' by a divine creature in 
lampblack, a shirt-waist worn outside his trousers, and 
an exaggerated development of stomach. What did he 
say, what did he sing? I don't know; I only know 
that it rested the soul and brain, that it soothed the 
conscience, and appeased the hungerings of ambition. 
Just to sit there and listen to that unalloyed nonsense 
was better than to 6 sport with Amaryllis in the shade, 
or with the tangles of Neaera's hair,' or to be the object 
of a votive dinner, or to be forgiven one's sins ; there is 
no such complete purgation of care as one gets from 
the real Afro- American when he is unreal, and lures 
one completely away from life, while professing to give 
his impressions of it. You, with your brute prefer- 
ences for literality, will not understand this, and I 
suppose you would say I ought to have got a purer 
and higher joy out of the little passage of drama, which 
followed, and I don't know but I did. It was nothing 
but the notion of a hapless, half-grown girl, who has 
run away from the poorhouse for a half-holiday, and 
brings up in the dooryard of an old farmer of the 
codger type, who knew her father and mother. She 
at once sings, one doesn't know why, c Oh, dear, what 
can the matter be/ and she takes out of her poor little 
carpet-bag a rag-doll, and puts it to sleep with c By 
low, baby,' and the old codger puts the other dolls 
to sleep, nodding his head, and kicking his foot out in 
time, and he ends by offering that poor thing a home 
with him. If he had not done it, I do not know how 
I could have borne it, for my heart was in my throat 
with pity, and the tears were in my eyes. Good 
heavens ! What simple instruments we men are ! The 
falsest note in all Hamlet is in those words of his to 
Guildenstern : ' You would play upon me ; you would 

seem to know my stops ; you would pluck out the heart 

38 



THE PKACTICES OF VAUDEVILLE 

of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest 
note to the top of my compass. . . . 'S blood, do you 
think I am easier to be played on than a pipe V Guild- 
enstern ought to have said : i Much, my lord ! Here is 
an actor who has been summering in the country, and 
has caught a glimpse of pathetic fact commoner than 
the dust in the road, and has built it up in a bit of 
drama as artless as a child would fancy, and yet it 
swells your heart and makes you cry. Your mystery? 
You have no mystery to an honest man. It is only 
fakes and frauds who do not understand the soul. The 
simplest willow whistle is an instrument more complex 
than man.' That is what I should have said in Guild- 
en stern's place if I had had Hamlet with me there at 
the vaudeville show. 

" In the pretty language of the playbill," the con- 
tributor went on, " this piece was called ' A Pastoral 
Playlet/ and I should have been willing to see ' Mandy 
Hawkins ' over again, instead of the * Seals and Sea 
Lions,' next placarded at the sides of the curtain im- 
mediately lifted on them. Perhaps I have seen too 
much of seals, but I find the range of their accomplish- 
ments limited, and their impatience for fish and lump 
sugar too frankly greedy before and after each act. 
Their banjo-playing is of a most casual and irrelevant 
sort ; they ring bells, to be sure ; in extreme cases they 
fire small cannon; and their feat of balancing large 
and little balls on their noses is beyond praise. But it 
may be that the difficulties overcome are too obvious in 
their instances; I find myself holding my breath, and 
helping them along too strenuously for my comfort. I 
am always glad when the curtain goes down on them; 
their mere flumping about the stage makes me un- 
happy; but they are not so bad, after all, as trained 

dogs. They were followed by three i Artistic Euro- 

39 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

pean Acrobats/ who compensated and consoled me for 
the seals, by the exquisite ease with which they wrought 
the impossibilities of their art, in the familiar sack- 
coats and top-coats of every day. I really prefer tights 
and spangles, but I will not refuse impossibilities sim- 
ply because they are performed, as our diplomats are 
instructed to appear at European courts, in the ordinary 
dress of a gentleman ; it may even add a poignancy to 
the pleasure I own so reluctantly. 

" There came another pair of ' Singers and Dancers,' 
and then a ' Trick Cyclist/ but really I cannot stand 
trick cycling, now that plain cycling, glory be! has so 
nearly gone out. As soon as the cyclist began to make 
his wheel rear up on its hind leg and carry him round 
the stage in that posture, I went away. But I had 
had enough without counting him, though I left the 
kalatechnoscope, with its shivering and shimmering 
unseen. I had had my fill of pleasure, rich and pure, 
such as I could have got at no legitimate theatre in 
town, and I came away opulently content." 

We reflected awhile before we remarked : " Then I 
don't see what you have to complain of or to write of. 
Where does the decline of the vaudeville come in?" 

" Oh," the rejected contributor said, with a laugh, 

" I forgot that. It's still so good, when compared with 

the mechanical drama of the legitimate theatre, that I 

don't know whether I can make out a case against it 

now. But I think I can, both in quality and quantity. 

I think the change began insidiously to steal upon the 

variety show with the increasing predominance of short 

plays. Since they were short, I should not have minded 

them so much, but they were always so bad! Still, I 

could go out, when they came on, and return for the 

tramp magician, or the comic musician, who played 

upon joints of stovepipe and the legs of reception-chairs 

40 



THE PRACTICES OF VAUDEVILLE 

and the like, and scratched matches on his two days' 
beard, and smoked a plaintive air on a cigarette. But 
when the ' playlets ' began following one another in 
unbroken succession, I did not know what to do. Al- 
most before I was aware of their purpose three of the 
leading vaudeville houses threw off the mask, and gave 
plays that took up the whole afternoon; and though 
they professed to intersperse the acts with what they 
called 6 big vaudeville,' I could not be deceived, and 
I simply stopped going. When I want to see a four- 
act play, I will go to the legitimate theatre, and see 
something that I can smell, too. The influence of the 
vaudeville has, on the whole, been so elevating and 
refining that its audiences cannot stand either the im- 
purity or the imbecility of the fashionable drama. But 
now the vaudeville itself is beginning to decline in 
quality as well as quantity." 

" Not toward immodesty ?" 

" 'No, not so much that. But the fine intellectual 
superiority of the continuous performance is begin- 
ning to suffer contamination from the plays where 
there are waits between the acts. I spoke just now 
of the tramp magician, but I see him no longer at the 
variety houses. The comic musician is of the rarest 
occurrence ; during the whole season I have as yet heard 
no cornet solo on a revolver or a rolling-pin. The most 
dangerous acts of the trapeze have been withdrawn. 
The acrobats still abound, but it is three long years 
since I looked upon a coon act with real Afro-Amer- 
icans in it, or saw a citizen of Cincinnati in a fur 
overcoat keeping a silk hat, an open umbrella, and a 
small wad of paper in the air with one hand. It is 
true that the conquest of the vaudeville houses by 
the full-fledged drama has revived the old-fashioned 
stock companies in manv cases, and. has so far worked 

41 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

for good, but it is a doubtful advantage when compared 
with the loss of the direct inspiration of the artists who 
created and performed their stunts." 

" Delightful word I" we dreamily noted. " How did 
it originate?" 

" Oh, I don't know. It's probably a perversion of 
stint, a task or part, which is also to be found in the 
dictionary as stent. What does it matter? There is 
the word, and there is the thing, and both are charming. 
I approve of the stunt because it is always the stunt- 
ist's own. He imagined it, he made it, and he loves 
it. He seems never to be tired of it, even when it is 
bad, and when nobody in the house lends him a hand 
with it. Of course, when it comes to that, it has to 
go, and he with it. It has to go when it is good, after 
it has had its day, though I don't see why it should 
go; for my part there are stunts I could see endlessly 
over again, and not weary of them. Can you say as 
much of any play ?" 

" Gilbert and Sullivan's operas," we suggested. 

" That is true. But without the music ? And even 
with the music, the public won't have them any longer. 
I would like to see the stunt fully developed. I should 
like to have that lovely wilding growth delicately nur- 
tured into drama as limitless and lawless as life itself, 
owing no allegiance to plot, submitting to no rule or 
canon, but going gayly on to nothingness as human 
existence does, full of gleaming lights, and dark with 
inconsequent glooms, musical, merry, melancholy, mad, 
but never-ending as the race itself." 

"You would like a good deal more than you are 
ever likely to get," we said; and here we thought it 
was time to bring our visitor to book again. " But 
about the decline of vaudeville ?" 

" Well, it isn't grovelling yet in the mire with popu- 

42 



THE PEACTICES OF VAUDEVILLE 

lar fiction, but it is standing still, and whatever is 
standing still is going backward, or at least other things 
are passing it. To hold its own, the vaudeville must 
grab something more than its own. It must venture 
into regions yet unexplored. It must seize not only 
the fleeting moments, but the enduring moments of ex- 
perience ; it should be wise not only to the whims and 
moods, but the passions, the feelings, the natures of 
men; for it appeals to a public not sophisticated by 
mistaken ideals of art, but instantly responsive to repre- 
sentations of life. Nothing is lost upon the vaudeville 
audience, not the lightest touch, not the airiest shadow 
of meaning. Compared with the ordinary audience at 
the legitimate theatres — " 

" Then what you wish," we concluded, " is to ele- 
vate the vaudeville." 

The visitor got himself out of the Easy Chair, with 
something between a groan and a growl. " You mean 
to kill it." 



INTIMATIONS OF ITALIAN OPERA 

Whether pleasure of the first experience is more 
truly pleasure than that which conies rich in associa- 
tions from pleasures of the past is a doubt that no 
hedonistic philosopher seems to have solved yet. We 
should, in fact, be sorry if any had, for in that case 
we should be without such small occasion as we now 
have to suggest it in the forefront of a paper which 
will not finally pass beyond the suggestion. When the 
reader has arrived at our last word we can safely prom- 
ise him he will still have the misgiving we set out with, 
and will be confirmed in it by the reflection that no 
pleasure, either of the earliest or the latest experience, 
can be unmixed with pain. One will be fresher than 
the other; that is all; but it is not certain that the 
surprise will have less of disappointment in it than the 
unsurprise. In the one case, the case of youth, say, 
there will be the racial disappointment to count with, 
and in the other, the case of age, there will be the 
personal disappointment, which is probably a lighter 
thing. The racial disappointment is expressed in what 
used to be called, somewhat untranslatably, Welt- 
schmerz. This was peculiarly the appanage of youth, 
being the anticipative melancholy, the pensive forebod- 
ing, distilled from the blighted hopes of former gen- 
erations of youth. Mixed with the effervescent blood 

44 



INTIMATIONS OF ITALIAN OPERA 

of the young heart, it acted like a subtle poison, and 
eventuated in more or less rhythmical deliriums, in 
cynical excesses of sentiment, in extravagances of be- 
havior, in effects Avhich commonly passed when the 
subject himself became ancestor, and transmitted his 
inherited burden of Weltschmerz to his posterity. The 
old are sometimes sad, on account of the sins and follies 
they have personally committed and know they will 
commit again, but for pure gloom — gloom positive, ab- 
solute, all but palpable — you must go to youth. That 
is not merely the time of disappointment, it is in itself 
disappointment; it is not what it expected to be; and 
it finds nothing which confronts it quite, if at all, 
responsive to the inward vision. The greatest, the love- 
liest things in the world lose their iridescence or dwin- 
dle before it. The old come to things measurably pre- 
pared to see them as they are, take them for what they 
are worth; but the young are the prey of impassioned 
prepossessions which can never be the true measures. 

The disadvantage of an opening like this is that it 
holds the same quality, if not quantity, of disappoint- 
ment as those other sublime things, and we earnestly 
entreat the reader to guard himself against expecting 
anything considerable from it. Probably the inexperi- 
enced reader has imagined from our weighty prologue 
something of signal importance to follow; but the 
reader who has been our reader through thick and thin 
for many years will have known from the first that 
we were not going to deal with anything more vital, 
say, than a few emotions and memories, prompted, one 
night of the other winter, by hearing one of the old- 
fashioned Italian operas which a more than commonly 
inspired management had been purveying to an over- 

Wagnered public. In fact, we had a sense that this 

45 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

sort of reader was there with us the night we saw 
" L' Elisir <T Amore," and that it was in his personality 
we felt and remembered many things which we could 
have fancied personal only to ourselves. 

He began to take the affair out of our keeping from 
the first moment, when, after passing through the 
crowd arriving from the snowy street, we found our 
way through the distracted vestibule of the opera- 
house into the concentred auditorium and hushed our- 
selves in the presence of the glowing spectacle of the 
stage. " Ah, this is the real thing," he whispered, and 
he would not let us, at any moment when we could 
have done so without molesting our neighbors, censure 
the introduction of Alpine architecture in the entour- 
age of an Italian village piazza. " It is a village at 
the foot of the Alps probably," he said, " and if not, 
no matter. It is as really the thing as all the rest: 
as the chorus of peasants and soldiers, of men and 
women who impartially accompany the orchestra in 
the differing sentiments of the occasion; as the rivals 
who vie with one another in recitative and aria ; as the 
heroine who holds them both in a passion of suspense 
while she weaves the enchantment of her trills and 
runs about them; as the whole circumstance of the 
divinely impossible thing which defies nature and tri- 
umphs over prostrate probability. What does a little 
Swiss Gothic matter? The thing is always opera, and 
it is always Italy. I was thinking, as we crowded in 
there from the outside, with our lives in our hands, 
through all those trolleys and autos and carriages and 
cabs and sidewalk ticket - brokers, of the first time 
I saw this piece. It was in Venice, forty-odd years 
ago, and I arrived at the theatre in a gondola, slipping 
to the water-gate with a waft of the gondolier's oar that 
was both impulse and arrest, and I was helped up the 

46 



INTIMATIONS OF ITALIAN OPERA 

sea-weedy, slippery steps by a beggar whom age and 
sorrow had bowed to just the right angle for supporting 
my hand on the shoulder he lent it. The blackness 
of the tide was pierced with the red plunge of a few 
lamps, and it gurgled and chuckled as my gondola 
lurched off and gave way to another; and when I got 
to my box — a box was two florins, but I could afford 
it — I looked down on just this scene, over a pit full of 
Austrian officers and soldiers, and round on a few Vene- 
tians darkling in the other boxes and haix-heartedly 
enjoying the music. It was the most hopeless hour of 
the Austrian occupation, and the air was heavy with 
its oppression and tobacco, for the officers smoked be- 
tween the acts. It was only the more intensely Italian 
for that; but it was not more Italian than this; and 
when I see those impossible people on the stage, and 
hear them sing, I breathe an atmosphere that is like 
the ether beyond the pull of our planet, and is as far 
from all its laws and limitations." 

Our friend continued to talk pretty well through 
the whole interval between the first and second acts; 
and we were careful not to interrupt him, for from the 
literary quality of his diction we fancied him talking 
for publication, and we wished to take note of every 
turn of his phrase. 

" It's astonishing," he said, " how little art needs in 
order to give the effect of life. A touch here and 
there is enough; but art is so conditioned that it has 
to work against time and space, and is obliged to fill 
up and round out its own body with much stuff that 
gives no sense of life. The realists," he went on, " were 
only half right." 

" Isn't it better to be half right than wrong alto- 
gether ?" we interposed. 

47 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

" I'm not sure. What I wanted to express is that 
every now and then I find in very defective art of all 
kinds that mere look of the real thing which suffices. 
A few words of poetry glance from the prose body of 
verse and make us forget the prose. A moment of 
dramatic motive carries hours of heavy comic or tragic 
performance. Is any piece of sculpture or painting al- 
together good ? Or isn't the spectator held in the same 
glamour which involved the artist before he began the 
work, and which it is his supreme achievement to im- 
part, so that it shall hide all defects ? When I read 
what you wrote the other month, or the other year, 
about the vaudeville shows — " 

" Hush !" we entreated. " Don't bring those low 
associations into this high presence." 

" Why not ? It is all the same thing. There is 
no inequality in the region of art; and I have seen 
things on the vaudeville stage which were graced with 
touches of truth so exquisite, so ideally ^.ne, that I 
might have believed I was getting them at first hand 
and pure from the street-corner. Of course, the poor 
fellows who had caught them from life had done their 
worst to imprison them in false terms, to labor them 
out of shape, and build them up in acts where any- 
thing less precious would have been lost ; but they sur- 
vived all that and gladdened the soul. I realized that 
I should have been making a mistake if I had required 
any c stunt ' which embodied them to be altogether 
composed of touches of truth, of moments of life. We 
can stand only a very little radium; the captured sun- 
shine burns with the fires that heat the summers of the 
farthest planets; and we cannot handle the miraculous 
substance as if it were mere mineral. A touch of truth 
is perhaps not only all we need, but all we can endure 
in any one example of art." 

48 



INTIMATIONS OF ITALIAN OPERA 

" You are lucky if you get so much," we said, " even 
at a vaudeville show." 

" Or at an opera," he returned, and then the curtain 
rose on the second act. When it fell again, he resumed, 
as if he had been interrupted in the middle of a sen- 
tence. " What should you say was the supreme mo- 
ment of this thing, or was the radioactive property, the 
very soul ? Of course, it is there where Nemorino 
drinks the elixir and finds himself freed from Adina; 
when he bursts into the joyous song of liberation and 
gives that delightful caper 

' Which signifies indifference, indifference, 
Which signifies indifference/ 

and which not uncommonly results from a philter com- 
posed entirely of claret. When Adina advances in the 
midst of his indifference and breaks into the lyrical 
lament 

' Neppur mi guarda !' 

she expresses the mystery of the sex which can be best 
provoked to love by the sense of loss, and the vital spark 
of the opera is kindled. The rest is mere incorporative 
material. It has to be. In other conditions the soul 
may be disembodied, and we may have knowledge of 
it without the interposition of anything material; but 
if there are spiritual bodies as there are material bodies, 
still the soul may wrap itself from, other souls and 
emit itself only in gleams. But putting all that aside, 
I should like to bet that the germ, the vital spark of the 
opera, felt itself life, felt itself flame, first of all in 
that exquisite moment of release which Nemorino's 
caper conveys. Till then it must have been rather 
blind groping, with nothing better in hand than that 

49 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

old, worn-out notion of a love-philter. What will vou 
bet?" 

" We never bet," we virtuously replied. " We are 
principled against it in all cases where we feel sure 
of losing ; though in this case we could never settle it, 
for both composer and librettist are dead." 

" Yes, isn't it sad that spirits so gay should be gone 
from a world that needs gayety so much? That is 
probably the worst of death; it is so indiscriminate," 
the reader thoughtfully observed. 

" But aren't you," we asked, " getting rather far 
away from the question whether the pleasure of experi- 
ence isn't greater than the pleasure of inexperience — 
whether later operas don't give more joy than the 
first?" 

" Was that the question ?" he returned. " I thought 
it was whether Italian opera was not as much at home 
in exile as in its native land." 

" Well, make it that," we responded, tolerantly. 

" Oh no," he met us half-way. " But it naturalizes 
itself everywhere. They have it in St. Petersburg and 
in Irkutsk, for all I know, and certainly in Calcutta 
and Australia, the same as in Milan and Venice and 
Naples, or as here in NTew York, where everything is 
so much at home, or so little. It's the most universal 
form of art." 

" Is it ? Why more so than sculpture or painting 
or architecture ?" 

Our demand gave the reader pause. Then he said: 
" I think it is more immediately universal than the 
other forms of art. These all want time to denation- 
alize themselves. It is their nationality which first 
authorizes them to be; but it takes decades, centuries 
sometimes, for them to begin their universal life. It 
seems different with operas. ( Cavalleria Rusticana ' 

50 



INTIMATIONS OE ITALIAN OPEKA 

was as much at home with us in its first year as 
' L'Elisir d'Amore ' is now in its sixtieth or seven- 
tieth." 

" But it isn't," we protested, " denationalized. What 
can be more intensely Italian than an Italian opera is 
anywhere V 

" You're right," the reader owned, as the reader al- 
ways must, if honest, in dealing with the writer. " It 
is the operatic audience, not the opera, which is de- 
nationalized when the opera becomes universal. We 
are all Italians here to-night. I only wish we were in 
our native land, listening to this musical peal of ghost- 
ly laughter from the past." 

The reader was silent a moment while the vast house 
buzzed and murmured and babbled from floor to roof. 
Perhaps the general note of the conversation, if it 
could have been tested, would have been found vol- 
untary rather than spontaneous ; but the sound was gay, 
and there could be no question of the splendor of the 
sight. We may decry our own almost as much as we 
please, but there is a point where we must cease to 
depreciate ourselves ; even for the sake of evincing our 
superiority to our possessions, we must not undervalue 
some of them. One of these is the Metropolitan Opera 
House, where the pride of wealth, the vanity of fash- 
ion, the beauty of youth, and the taste and love of 
music fill its mighty cup to the brim in the propor- 
tions that they bear to one another in the community. 
Wherever else we fail of our ideal, there we surely 
realize it on terms peculiarly our own. Subjec- 
tively the scene is intensely responsive to the New 
York spirit, and objectively it is most expressive of 
the American character in that certain surface ef- 
fect of thin brilliancy which remains with the spec- 

51 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

tator the most memorable expression of its physiog- 
nomy. 

No doubt something like this was in the reader's 
mind when he resumed, with a sigh : " It's rather pa- 
thetic how much more magnificently Italian opera has 
always been circumstanced in exile than at home. It 
had to emigrate in order to better its fortunes ; it could 
soon be better seen if not heard outside of Italy than 
in its native country. It was only where it could be 
purely conventional as well as ideal that it could 
achieve its greatest triumphs. It had to make a hard 
fight for its primacy among the amusements that flat- 
ter the pride as well as charm the sense. You remem- 
ber how the correspondents of Mr. Spectator wrote to 
him in scorn of the affected taste of ' the town ' when 
the town in London first began to forsake the theatre 
and to go to the opera ?" 

" Yes, they were very severe on the town for pre- 
tending to a pleasure imparted in a language it could 
not understand a word of. They had all the reason 
on their side, and they needed it; but the opera is in- 
dependent of reason, and the town felt that for its own 
part it could dispense with reason, too. The town can 
always do that. It would not go seriously or constantly 
to English opera, though ever so much invited to do 
so, for all the reasons, especially the patriotic reasons. 
Isn't it strange, by-the-way, how English opera is a 
fashion, while Italian opera remains a passion % We 
had it at its best, didn't we, in the Gilbert and Sullivan 
operas, which were the most charming things in the 
world; but they charmed only for a while, and it may 
be doubted whether they ever greatly charmed the town. 
The manager of the Metropolitan replaces German with 
Italian opera, and finds his account in it, but could 
he find his account in it if he put on ' The Mikado ' in- 

52 



INTIMATIONS OF ITALIAN OPEKA 

stead of ' L'Elisir d'Amore ' ? If he did so, the town 
would not be here. Why ?" 

The reader did not try to answer at once. He seemed 
to be thinking, but perhaps he was not; other readers 
may judge from his reply, which, when it came, was 
this : " There seems to be something eternally as well 
as universally pleasing in Italian opera ; but what the 
thing is, or how much of a thing it is, I wouldn't un- 
dertake to say. Possibly the fault of English opera is 
its actuality. It seizes upon a contemporaneous mood 
or fad, and satirizes it: but the Italian opera at its 
lightest deals with a principle of human nature, and 
it is never satirical; it needn't be, for it is as inde- 
pendent of the morals as of the reasons. It isn't 
obliged, by the terms of its existence, to teach, any 
more than it is obliged to convince. It's the most 
absolute thing in the world; and from its unnatural 
height it can stoop at will in moments of enrapturing 
naturalness without ever losing poise. Wasn't that de- 
lightful where Caruso hesitated about his encore, and 
then, with a shrug and a waft of his left hand to the 
house, went off in order to come back and give his 
aria with more effect? That was a touch of natural- 
ness not in the scheme of the opera." 

" Yes, but it was more racial, more personal, than 
natural. It was delicious, but we are not sure we ap- 
proved of it." 

" Ah, in Italian opera you're not asked to approve ; 
you're only desired to enjoy !" 

" Well, then that bit of racial personality was of the 
effect of actuality, and it jarred." 

" Perhaps you're right," the reader sighed, but he 

added : " It was charming ; yes, it made itself part 

of the piece. Nemorino would have done just as 

Caruso did." 

53 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

At the last fall of the curtain the reader and the 
writer rose in unison, a drop of that full tide of life 
which ebbed by many channels out of the vast audito- 
rium, and in two or three minutes left it dry. They 
stayed in their duplex personality to glance at the 
silken evanescences from the boxes, and then, being in 
the mood for the best society, they joined the shining 
presences in the vestibule where these waited for their 
carriages and automobiles. Of this company the inter- 
locutors felt themselves so inseparably part that they 
could with difficulty externate themselves so far as to 
observe that it was of the quality of " the town " which 
had gone to Italian opera from the first. 

In Mr. Spectator's time the town would have been 
lighted by the smoky torches of linkboys to its chairs; 
now it was called to its electric autos in the blaze of a 
hundred incandescent bulbs ; but the difference was not 
enough to break the tradition. There was something 
in the aspect of that patrician throng, as it waited the 
turn of each, which struck the reader and writer jointly 
as a novel effect from any American crowd, but which 
the writer scarcely dares intimate to the general reader, 
for the general reader is much more than generally a 
woman, and she may not like it. Perhaps we can keep 
it from offending by supposing that the fact can be 
true only of the most elect socially, but in any case 
the fact seemed to be that the men were handsomer 
than the women. They were not only handsomer, but 
they were sweller (if we may use a comparative hith- 
erto unachieved) in look, and even in dress. 

How this could have happened in a civilization so 
peculiarly devoted as ours to the evolution of female 
beauty and style is a question which must be referred 
to scientific inquiry. It does not affect the vast average 
of woman's loveliness and taste among us in ranks be- 

54 



INTIMATIONS OF ITALIAN OPERA 

low the very highest; this remains unquestioned and 
unquestionable; and perhaps, in the given instance, 
it was an appearance and not a fact, or .perhaps 
the joint spectator was deceived as to the supreme 
social value of those rapidly dwindling and dissolving 
groups. 

The reader and the writer were some time in find- 
ing their true level, when they issued into the common 
life of the street, and they walked home as much like 
driving home as they could. On the way the reader, 
who was so remotely lost in thought that the writer 
could scarcely find him, made himself heard in a 
musing suspiration : " There was something missing. 
Can you think what it was ?" 

" Yes, certainly ; there was no ballet." 

"Ah, to be sure: no ballet! And there used al- 
ways to be a ballet! You remember," the reader 
said, " how beatific it always was to have the minor 
coryphees subside in nebulous ranks on either side 
of the stage, and have the great planetary splendor 
of the prima ballerina come swiftly floating down the 
centre to the very footlights, beaming right and left? 
Ah, there's nothing in life now like that radiant mo- 
ment! But even that was eclipsed when she rose on 
tiptoe and stubbed it down the scene on the points of 
her slippers, with the soles of her feet showing vertical 
in the act. Why couldn't we have had that to-night? 
Yes, we have been cruelly wronged." 

" But you don't give the true measure of our injury. 
You forget that supreme instant when the master-spirit 
of the ballet comes skipping suddenly forward, and 
leaping into the air with calves that exchange a shim- 
mer of kisses, and catches the prima ballerina at the 
waist, and tosses her aloft, and when she comes down 
supports her as she bends this way and that way, and 

55 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

all at once stiffens for her bow to the house. Think 
of our having been defrauded of that!" 

" Yes, we have been wickedly defrauded." The 
reader was silent for a while, and then he said : " I 
wonder if anybody except the choreographic composer 
ever knew what the story of any ballet was? Were 
you ever able to follow it V 9 

" Certainly not. It is bad enough following the 
opera. All that one wishes to do in one case is to look, 
just as in the other case all one wishes to do is to 
listen. We would as lief try to think out the full mean- 
ing of a Browning poem in the pleasure it gave us, as 
to mix our joy in the opera or the ballet with any severe 
question of their purport." 



VI 

THE SUPERIORITY OF OUR INFERIORS 

The satirical reader introduced himself with a 
gleam in his eye which kindled apprehension in the 
unreal editor's breast, and perhaps roused in him a cer- 
tain guilty self-consciousness. 

" I didn't know/ 7 the reader said, " that you were 
such a well-appointed arbiter elegantiarum." 

" Meaning our little discourse last month on the 
proper form of addressing letters?" the editor boldly 
grappled with the insinuation. "Oh yes; etiquette is 
part of our function. We merely hadn't got round to 
the matter before. You liked our remarks?" 

" Very much," our visitor said, with the fine irony 
characteristic of him. " All the more because I hadn't 
expected that sort of thing of you. What I have ex- 
pected of you hitherto was something more of xhe 
major morality." 

" But the large-sized morals did not enter into that 
scheme. We deal at times with the minor morality, 
too, if the occasion demands, as we have suggested. 
You should not have been surprised to find politeness, 
as well as righteousness, advocated or applauded here. 
Naturally, of course, we prefer the larger-sized morals 
as questions for discussion. Had you one of the larger- 
sized questions of morality to present ?" 

" I was thinking it was a larger-sized question of 
manners." 

5 57 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

" For example." 

" The experience of one of those transatlantic celebri- 
ties who seem to be rather multiplying upon us of late, 
and who come here with a proclamation of their wor- 
ship of American women ready to present, as if in 
print, to the swarming interviewers on the pier, and 
who then proceed to find fault with our civilization on 
every other point, almost before they drive up to their 
hotels." 

" But isn't that rather an old story ?" 

" I suppose it is rather old, but it always interests 
us ; we are never free from that longing for a flattered 
appearance in the eyes of others which we so seldom 
achieve. This last, or next to last, celebrity — in the 
early winter it is impossible to fix their swift succes- 
sion — seems to have suffered amaze at the rude be- 
havior of some dairymaids in the milk-room of the lady 
who was showing the celebrity over her premises. I 
didn't understand the situation very clearly. The lady 
must have been a lady farmer, in order to have a milk- 
room with dairymaids in it ; but in any case the fact is 
that when the lady entered with the celebrity the maids 
remained seated, where they were grouped together, in- 
stead of rising and standing in the presence of their 
superiors, as they would have done in the hemisphere 
that the celebrity came from." 

" Well, what came of it .?" 

" Oh, nothing. It was explained to the delebrity that 
the maids did not rise because they felt themselves as 
good as their mistress and her guest, and saw no reason 
for showing them a servile deference : that this was the 
American ideal." 

" In the minds of those Swedish, Irish, English, 
Polish, German, or Bohemian dairymaids," we mur- 
mured, dreamily, and when our reader roused us from 

58 



SUPERIORITY OF OUR INFERIORS 

our muse with a sharp " What ?" we explained, " Of 
course they were not American dairymaids, for it 
stands to reason that if they were dairymaids they 
could not be Americans, or if Americans they could 
not be dairymaids." 

" True," our friend assented, " but all the same you 
admit that they were behaving from an American 
ideal?" 

" Yes." 

"Well, that ideal is what the celebrity objects to. 
The celebrity doesn't like it — on very high grounds." 

" The grounds of social inequality, the inferiority 
of those who work to those who pay, and the right of 
the superiors to the respect of the inferiors ?" 

" No, the politeness due from one class to another." 

" Such as lives between classes in Europe, we sup- 
pose. Well, that is very interesting. Is it of record 
that the lady and her guest, on going into the milk- 
room where the dairymaids remained rudely seated, 
bowed or nodded to them or said, c Good-day, young 
ladies ' V 9 

" '.No, that is not of record." 

" Their human quality, their human equality, being 
altogether out of the question, was probably in no wise 
recognized. Why, then, should they have recognized 
the human quality of their visitors ?" Our satirical 
reader was silent, and we went on. " There is some- 
thing very droll in all that. We suppose you have 
often been vexed, or even outraged, by the ingratitude 
of the waiter whom you had given a handsome tip, 
over and above the extortionate charge of the house, 
and who gathered up your quarter or half-dollar and 
slipped it into his pocket without a word, or even an 
inarticulate murmur, of thanks ?" 

" Often. Outraged is no word for it." 

59 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

" Yes," we assented, feeling onr way delicately. 
" Has it ever happened that in the exceptional case 
where the waiter has said, ' Thank you very much,' 
or the like, you have responded with a cordial, ' You're 
welcome/ or, ' Not at all ' V 9 

" Certainly not." 

"Why not?" 

" Because — because — those are terms of politeness 
between — " 

Our friend hesitated, and we interrogatively sup- 
plied the word, " Equals ? There are always difficul- 
ties between unequals. But try this, some day, and 
see what a real gratitude you will get from the waiter. 
It isn't infallible, but the chances are he will feel that 
you have treated him like a man, and will do or say 
something to show his feeling: he will give a twitch 
to your under-coat when he has helped you on with 
your top-coat, which will almost pull you over. We 
have even tried saying ' You are welcome ' to a beggar. 
It's astonishing how they like it. By-the-way, have 
you the habit of looking at your waiter when he comes 
to take your order ; or do you let him stand facing you, 
without giving him a glance above the lower button of 
his poor, greasy waistcoat V 9 

" No, the theory is that he is part of the mechanism 
of the establishment." 

" That is the theory. But it has its inconveniences. 
We ourselves used to act upon it, but often, when we 
found him long in bringing our order, we were at a 
loss which waiter to ask whether it would be ready 
some time during the evening; and occasionally we 
have blown up the wrong waiter, who did not fail to 
bring us to shame for our error." 

" They do look so confoundedly alike," our visitor 
said, thoughtfully. 

60 



SUPERIORITY OF OUR INFERIORS 

" We others look confoundedly alike to them, no 
doubt. If they studied us as little as we study them, 
if they ignored us as contemptuously as we do them, 
upon the theory that we, too, are part of the mechanism, 
the next man would be as likely as we to get our 
dinner." 

" They are paid to study us," our visitor urged. 

" Ah, paid! The intercourse of unequals is a com- 
mercial transaction, but when the inferiors propose to 
make it purely so the superiors object : they want some- 
thing to boot, something thrown in, some show of re- 
spect, some appearance of gratitude. Perhaps those 
dairymaids did not consider that they were paid to 
stand up when their employer and the visiting celebrity 
came into the milk - room, and so, unless they were 
civally recognized — we don't say they weren't in this 
case — they thought they would do some of the ignoring, 
too. It is surprising how much the superiors think 
they ought to get for their money from the inferiors 
in that commercial transaction. For instance, they 
think they buy the right to call their inferiors by their 
first names, but they don't think they sell a similar 
right with regard to themselves. They call them Mary 
and John, but they would be surprised and hurt if the 
butler and waitress addressed them as Mary and John. 
Yet there is no reason for their surprise. Do you re- 
member in that entrancing and edifying comedy of 
' Arms and the Man ' — Mr. Bernard Shaw's very best, 
as we think — the wild Bulgarian maid calls the daugh- 
ter of the house by her Christian name ? ' But you 
mustn't do that,' the mother of the house instructs her. 
' Why not V the girl demands. ' She calls me Louka.' " 

" Capital !" our friend agreed. " But, of course, 

Shaw doesn't mean it." 

" You never can tell whether he means a thing or 

61 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

not. We think he meant in this case, as Ibsen means 
in all cases, that you shall ]ook where yon stand." 

Our satirist seemed to have lost something of his 
gayety. " Aren't you taking the matter a little too 
seriously ?" 

" Perhaps. But we thought you wanted us to he 
more serious than we were about addressing letters 
properly. This is the larger-sized morality, the real 
No. 11 sort, and you don't like it, though you said you 
expected it of us." 

" Oh, but I do like it, though just at present I hadn't 
expected it. But if you're in earnest you must admit 
that the lower classes with us are abominably rude. 
"Now, I have the fancy — perhaps from living on the 
Continent a good deal in early life, where I formed the 
habit — of saying good-morning to the maid or the but- 
ler when I come down. But they never seem to like 
it, and I can't get a good-morning back unless I dig 
it out of them. I don't want them to treat me as a 
superior ; I only ask to be treated as an equal." 

" We have heard something like that before, but we 
doubt it. What you really want is to have your con- 
descension recognized; they feel that, if they don't 
know it. Besides, their manners have been formed 
by people who don't ask good-morning from them ; they 
are so used to being treated as if they were not there 
that they cannot realize they are there. We have heard 
city people complain of the wane of civility among 
country people when they went to them in the summer 
to get the good of their country air. They say that 
the natives no longer salute them in meeting, but we 
never heard that this happened when they first saluted 
the natives. Try passing the time of day with the 
next farmer you meet on a load of wood, and you will 

find that the old-fashioned civility is still to be had 

62 



SUPEKIOKITY OF OUR INFERIORS 

for the asking. But it won't be offered without the 
asking; the American who thinks from your dress and 
address that you don't regard him as an equal will not 
treat you as one at the risk of a snub ; and he is right. 
As for domestics — or servants, as we insolently call 
them — their manners are formed on their masters', and 
are often very bad. But they are not always bad. We, 
too, have had that fancy of yours for saying good- 
morning when we come down; it doesn't always work, 
but it oftener works than not. A friend of ours has 
tried some such civility at others' houses: at his host's 
house when the door was opened to him, arriving for 
dinner, and he was gloomily offered a tiny envelope 
with the name of the ladv he was to take out. At first 
it surprised, but when it was imagined to be well meant 
it was apparently liked ; in extreme cases it led to note 
of the weather; the second or third time at the same 
house it established something that would have passed, 
with the hopeful spectator, for a human relation. Of 
course, you can't carry this sort of thing too far. You 
can be kind, but you must not give the notion that you 
do not know your place." 

" Ah ! You draw the line," our friend exulted. 
" I thought so. But where ?" 

" At the point where you might have the impression 
that you respected butlers, when you merely loved your 
fellow-men. You see the difference?" 

" But isn't .loving your fellow-men enough ? Why 
should you respect butlers V 9 

" To be sure. But come to think of it, why shouldn't 

you? What is it in domestic employ that degrades, 

that makes us stigmatize it as ' service ' ? As soon as 

you get out-of-doors the case changes. You must often 

have seen ladies fearfully snubbed by their coachmen; 

and as for chauffeurs, who may kill you or somebody 

63 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

else at any moment, the mental attitude of the average 
automohilaire toward them must be one of abject defer- 
ence. But there have been some really heroic, some 
almost seraphic, efforts to readjust the terms of a re- 
lation that seems to have something essentially odious 
in it. In the old times, the times of the simple life 
now passed forever, when the daughter of one family 
1 lived out ' in another, she ate with the family and 
shared alike with them. She was their help, but she 
became their hindrance when she insisted upon the 
primitive custom after i waiting at table ? had passed 
the stage when the dishes were all set down, and the 
commensals i did their own stretching.' Heroes and 
seraphs did their utmost to sweeten and soften the situa- 
tion, but the unkind tendency could not be stayed. The 
daughter of the neighbor who ' lived out ' became ' the 
hired girl/ and then she became the waitress, especially 
when she was of neighbors beyond seas; and then the 
game was up. Those who thought humanely of the pre- 
dicament and wished to live humanely in it tried one 
thing and tried another. That great soul of H. D. L., 
one of the noblest and wisest of our economic reformers, 
now gone to the account which any might envy him, 
had a usage which he practised with all guests who 
came to his table. Before they sat down he or his 
wife said, looking at the maid who was to serve the 
dinner, ' This is our friend, Miss Murphy ? ; and then 
the guests were obliged in some sort to join the host 
and hostess in recognizing the human quality of the 
attendant. It was going rather far, but we never heard 
that any harm came of it. Some thought it rather odd, 
but most people thought it rather nice." 

" And you advocate the general adoption of such a 
custom?" our friend asked, getting back to the sar- 
casm of his opening note. " Suppose a larger dinner, 

64 



SUPERIORITY OF OUR INFERIORS 

a fashionable dinner, with half a dozen men waiters? 
That sort of thing might do at the table of a reformer, 
which only the more advanced were invited to; but it 
wouldn't work with the average retarded society woman 
or clubman." 

" What good thing works with them f" we retorted, 
spiritedly. " But no, the custom would not be readily 
adopted even among enlightened thinkers. We do not 
insist upon it; the men and the maids might object; 
they might not like knowing the kind of people who are 
sometimes asked to quite good houses. To be sure, 
they are not obliged to recognize them out of the 
house." 

" But what," our friend asked, " has all this got 
to do with the question of ' the decent respect ' due 
from domestics, as you prefer to call them, to their 
employers ?" 

"As in that case of the dairymaids which we be- 
gan with ? But why was any show of respect due from 
them? Was it nominated in the bond that for their 
four or five dollars a week they were to stand up when 
their ' mistress ' and her ' company ? entered the room ? 
Why, in fine, should any human being respect another, 
seeing what human beings generally are ? We may love 
one another, but respect I No, those maids might, and 
probably did, love their mistress; but they felt that 
they could show their love as well sitting down as stand- 
ing up. They would not stand up to show their love 
for one another." 

" Then you think there is some love lost between 
the master and man or mistress and maid nowadays," 
our beaten antagonist feebly sneered. 

" The masters and mistresses may not, but the men 
and maids may, have whole treasures of affection ready 
to lavish at the first sign of a desire for it; they do 

65 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

not say so, for they are not very articulate. In the 
mean time the masters and mistresses want more than 
they have paid for. They want honor as well as obedi- 
ence, respect as well as love, the sort of thing that 
money used to buy when it was worth more than it is 
now. Well, they won't get it. They will get it less 
and less as time goes on. Whatever the good new 
times may bring, they won't bring back the hypocritical 
servility of the good old times. They — " 

We looked round for our visiting reader, but he had 
faded back into the millions of readers whom we are 
always addressing in print. 



VII 

UNIMPORTANCE OF WOMEN IN REPUBLICS 

A visitor of the Easy Chair who seemed to have no 
conception of his frequency, and who. was able to sup- 
ply from his imagination the welcome which his host 
did not always hurry to offer him, found a place for 
himself on the window-sill among the mistaken MSS. 
sent in the delusion that the editor of the Chair was the 
editor of the magazine. 

" I have got a subject for you," he said. 

" Have you ever heard," we retorted, " of carrying 
coals to ^Newcastle ? What made you think we wanted 
a subject?" 

" Merely that perfunctory air of so many of your 
disquisitions. I should think you would feel the want 
yourself. Your readers all feel it for you." 

" Well, we can tell you," we said, " that there could 
be no greater mistake. We are turning away subjects 
from these premises every day. They come here, hat 
in hand, from morning till night, asking to be treated ; 
and after dark they form a Topic Line at our door, 
begging for the merest pittance of a notice, for the 
slightest allusion, for the most cursory mention. Do 
you know that there are at least two hundred thousand 
subjects in this town out of a job now? If you have 
got a subject, you had better take it to the country 
press; the New York magazines and reviews are over- 

67 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

stocked with them ; the newspapers, morning and even- 
ing, are simply inundated with subjects; subjects are 
turned down every Sunday in the pulpits; they cannot 
get standing-room in the theatres. Why, we have just 
this moment dismissed a subject of the first inter- 
est. Have you heard how at a late suffrage meeting 
one lady friend of votes for women declared herself 
an admirer of monarchies because they always gave 
women more recognition, more honor, than republics V 

" No, I haven't/ 7 our visitor said. 

" Well, it happened," we affirmed. " But every nook 
and cranny of our brain was so full of subjects that 
we simply could not give this a moment's considera- 
tion, and we see that all the other editors in New York 
were obliged to turn the cold shoulder to it, though 
they must have felt, as we did, that it was of prime 
importance." 

From a position of lounging ease our visitor sat up, 
and began to nurse one of his knees between his clasped 
hands. " But if," he asked, " you had been able to con- 
sider the subject, what should you have said ?" 

" There are a great many ways of considering a 
subject like that," we replied. " We might have taken 
the serious attitude, and inquired how far the female 
mind, through the increasing number of Anglo-Amer- 
ican marriages in our international high life, has be- 
come honeycombed with monarchism. We might have 
held that the inevitable effect of such marriages was to 
undermine the republican ideal at the very source of 
the commonwealth's existence, and by corrupting the 
heart of American motherhood must have weakened the 
fibre of our future citizenship to the point of supinely 
accepting any usurpation that promised ranks and titles 
and the splendor of court life." 

" Wouldn't you have been rather mixing your meta- 

68 



WOMEN IN REPUBLICS 

phors?" our visitor asked, with an air of having fol- 
lowed us over a difficult country. 

" In a cause like that, no patriotic publicist would 
have minded mixing his metaphors. He would have 
felt that the great thing was to keep his motives pure ; 
and in treating such a subject our motives would have 
remained the purest, whatever became of our meta- 
phors. At the same time this would not have pre- 
vented our doing justice to the position taken by that 
friend of votes for women. We should have frankly 
acknowledged that there was a great deal to be said 
for it, and that republics had hitherto been remiss in 
not officially acknowledging the social primacy of wom- 
an, but, in fact, distinctly inviting her to a back seat 
in public affairs. We should then have appealed to 
our thoughtful readers to give the matter their most 
earnest attention, and with the conservatism of all seri- 
ous inquirers we should have urged them to beware of 
bestowing the suffrage on a class of the community dis- 
posed so boldly to own its love of the splendors of the 
state. Would it be sage, would it be safe, to indulge 
with democratic equality a sex which already had its 
eyes on the flattering inequality of monarchy? Per- 
haps at this point we should digress a little and men- 
tion Montesquieu, whose delightful Spirit of Laws we 
have lately been reading. We should remind the 
reader, who would like to think he had read him too, 
how Montesquieu distinguishes between the principles 
on which the three sorts of government are founded: 
civic virtue being the base of a republic, honor the 
ruling motive in the subjects of a monarchy, and fear 
the dominant passion in the slaves of a despotism. 
Then we should ask whether men were prepared to 
intrust the reins of government to women when they 
had received this timely intimation that women were 

69 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

more eager to arrive splendidly than to bring the car 
of state in safety to the goal. How long would it be, 
we should poignantly demand, before in passing from 
the love of civic virtue to the ambition of honor, we 
should sink in the dread of power V 9 

Our visitor was apparently not so deeply impressed 
by the treatment of the subject here outlined as we 
had been intending and expecting he should be. He 
asked, after a moment, " Don't you think that would be 
rather a heavy-handed way of dealing with the matter V 9 

"Oh," we returned, "we have light methods of 
treating the weightiest questions. There is the semi- 
ironical vein, for instance, which you must have noticed 
a good deal in us, and perhaps it would be better suited 
to the occasion." 

" Yes V 9 our visitor suggested. 

" Yes," we repeated. " In that vein we should ques- 
tion at the start whether any such praise of monarchy 
had been spoken, and then we should suppose it had, 
and begin playfully to consider what the honors and 
distinctions were that women had enjoyed under mon- 
archy. We should make a merit at the start of throw- 
ing up the sponge for republics. We should own they 
had never done the statesmanlike qualities of women 
justice. We should glance, but always a little mocking- 
ly, at the position of woman in the Greek republics, and 
contrast, greatly to the republican disadvantage, her 
place in the democracy of Athens with that she held in 
the monarchy of Sparta. We should touch upon the fact 
that the Athenian women were not only not in politics, 
but were not even in society, except a class which could 
be only fugitively mentioned, and we should freely 
admit that the Spartan women were the heroic inspira- 
tion of the men in all the virtues of patriotism at home 

as well as in the field. We should recognize the sort 

70 



WOMEN IN KEPUBLICS 

of middle station women held in the Roman republic, 
where they were not shut up in the almost Oriental 
seclusion of Athenian wives, nor invited to a share in 
competitive athletics like the Spartan daughters. We 
should note that if a Spartan mother had the habit of 
bidding her son return with his shield or on it, a Ro- 
man mother expressed a finer sense of her importance 
in the state when she intimated that it was enough for 
her to be the parent of the Gracchi. But we should not 
insist upon our point, which, after all, would not prove 
that the decorative quality of women in public life was 
recognized in Rome as it always has been in mon- 
archies, and we should recur to the fact that this was 
the point which had been made against all republics. 
Coming down to the Italian republics, we should have 
to own that Venice, with her ducal figurehead, had 
practically a court at which women shone as they do in 
monarchies; while in Florence, till the Medici estab- 
lished themselves in sovereign rule, women played 
scarcely a greater part than in Athens. It was only 
with the Medici that we began to hear of such dis- 
tinguished ladies as Bianca Cappello ; and in the long, 
commonplace annals of the Swiss commonwealth we 
should be able to recall no female name that lent lustre 
to any epoch. We should contrast this poverty with 
the riches of the French monarchy, adorned with the 
memories of Agnes Sorel, of Diane de Poitiers, of 
Madame de Montespan, of Madame de Pompadour, 
following one another in brilliant succession, and shar- 
ing not only the glory but the authority of the line of 
princes whose affections they ruled. Of course, we 
should have to use an ironical gravity in concealing 
their real quality and the character of the courts where 
they flourished; and in comparing the womanless ob- 
scurity of the English Commonwealth with the femi- 

71 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

nine effulgence of the Restoration, we should seek a 
greater effect in our true aim by concealing the name 
and nature of the ladies who illustrated the court of 
Charles II." 

" And what would your true aim be V our visitor 
pressed, with an unseemly eagerness which we chose to 
snub by ignoring it. 

" As for the position of women in despotisms," we 
continued, " we should confess that it seemed to be as 
ignobly subordinate as that of women in republics. 
They were scarcely more conspicuous than the Citi- 
zenesses who succeeded in the twilight of the One and 
Indivisible the marquises and comtesses and duchesses 
of the Ancien Regime, unless they happened, as they 
sometimes did, to be the head of the state. Without 
going back to the semi-mythical Semiramis, we should 
glance at the characters of Cleopatra and certain Byz- 
antine usurpresses, and with a look askance at the two 
empresses of Russia, should arrive at her late imperial 
majesty of China. The poor, bad Isabella of Spain 
would concern us no more than the great, good Victoria 
of England, for they were the heads of monarchies and 
not of despotisms; but we should subtly insinuate that 
the reigns of female sovereigns were nowhere adorned 
by ladies of the distinction so common as hardly to be 
distinction in the annals of kings and emperors. What 
famous beauty embellished the court of Elizabeth or 
either Mary? Even Anne's Mrs. Masham was not a 
shining personality, and her Sarah of Marlborough was 
only a brilliant shrew. 

" At this point we should digress a little, but we 
should pursue our inquiry in the same satirical tenor. 
We hope we are not of those moralists who assume a 
merit in denouncing the international marriages which 

have brought our women, some to think tolerantly and 

72 



WOMEN IN REPUBLICS 

some to think favorably of a monarchy as affording 
greater scope for their social genins. But we should 
ask, with the mock-seriousness befitting such a psycho- 
logical study, how it was that, while American girls 
married baronets and viscounts and earls and dukes, 
almost none, if any, of their brothers married the sis- 
ters or daughters of such noblemen. It could not be 
that they were not equally rich and therefore equally 
acceptable, and could it be that they made it a matter 
of conscience not to marry ladies of title ? Were our 
men, then, more patriotic than our women? Were 
men naturally more republican than women ? 

" This question would bring us to the pass where 
we should more or less drop the mocking mask. We 
should picture a state of things in which we had act- 
ually arrived at a monarchy of our own, with a real 
sovereign and a nobility and a court, and the rest of 
the tradition. With a sudden severity we should ask 
where, since they could not all be of the highest rank, 
our women would consent to strike the procession of 
precedence? How, with their inborn and inbred no- 
tions of the deference due their sex, with that pride of 
womanhood which our republican chivalry has cher- 
ished in them, they would like, when they went to 
court, to stand, for hours perhaps, while a strong young 
man, or a fat old man, or a robust man in the prime 
of life, remained seated in the midst of them ? Would 
it flatter their hopes of distinction to find the worst 
scenes of trolley-car or subway transit repeated at the 
highest social function in the land, with not even a 
hanging-strap to support their weariness, their weak- 
ness, or, if we must say it, their declining years? 
Would the glory of being part of a spectacle testifying 
in our time to the meanness and rudeness of the past 
be a compensation for the aching legs and breaking 
6 73 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

backs under the trailing robes and the nodding plumes 
of a court dress?" 

" That would be a telling stroke," our visitor said, 
" but wouldn't it be a stroke retold ? It doesn't seem 
to me very new." 

" No matter," we said. " The question is not what 
a thing is, but how it is done. You asked how we 
should treat a given subject, and we have answered." 

" And is that all you could make of it ?" 

" By no means. As subjects are never exhausted, 
so no subject is ever exhausted. We could go on with 
this indefinitely. We could point out that the trouble 
was, with us, not too much democracy, but too little; 
that women's civic equality with men was perhaps the 
next step, and not the social inequality among persons 
of both sexes. Without feeling that it affected our 
position, we would acknowledge that there was now 
greater justice for women in a monarchy like Great 
Britain than in a republic like the United States ; with 
shame we would acknowledge it; but we would never 
admit that it was so because of the monarchism of the 
first or the republicanism of the last. We should finally 
be very earnest with this phase of our subject, and we 
should urge our fair readers to realize that citizenship 
was a duty as well as a right. We should ask them 
before accepting the suffrage to consider its responsi- 
bilities and to study them in the self-sacrificing at- 
titude of their husbands and fathers, or the brothers 
of one another, toward the state. We should make 
them observe that the actual citizen was not immediate- 
ly concerned with the pomps and glories of public life; 
that parties and constituencies were not made up of 
one's fellow-aristocrats, but were mostly composed of 
plebeians very jealous of any show of distinction, and 
that, in spite of the displeasures of political associa- 

74 



WOMEN IN KEPUBLIOS 

tion with them, there was no present disposition in 
American men to escape to monarchy from them. We 
cannot, we should remind them, all be of good family; 
that takes time, or has taken it ; and without good fam- 
ily the chances of social eminence, or even prominence, 
are small at courts. Distinction is more evenly dis- 
tributed in a democracy like ours; everybody has a 
chance at it. To be sure, it is not the shining honor 
bestowed by kings, but when we remember how often 
the royal hand needs washing we must feel that the 
honor from it may have the shimmer of putrescence. 
This is, of course, the extreme view of the case; and 
the condition of the royal hand is seldom scrutinized 
by those who receive or those who witness the honor 
bestowed. But the honor won from one's fellow-citizens 
is something worth having, though it is not expressed 
in a ribbon or a title. Such honor, it seems probable, 
will soon be the reward of civic virtue in women as 
well as men, and we hope women will not misprize it. 
The great end to be achieved for them by the suffrage 
is self-government, but with this goes the government 
of others, and that is very pleasant. The head of our 
state may be a woman, chosen at no far-distant elec- 
tion; and though it now seems droll to think of a 
woman being president, it will come in due time to 
seem no more so than for a woman to be a queen or an 
empress. At any rate, we must habituate our minds 
to the idea ; we must realize it with the hope it implies 
that no woman will then care socially to outshine her 
sister; at the most she will be emulous of her in civic 
virtue, the peculiar grace and glory of republics. We 
understand that this is already the case in New Zea- 
land and Colorado and Wyoming. It is too soon, per- 
haps, to look for the effect of suffrage on the female 
character in Denmark; it may be mixed, because there 

75 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

the case is complicated by the existence of a king, which 
may contaminate that civic virtue by the honor which 
is the moving principle in a monarchy. And now/' we 
turned lightly to our visitor, " what is the topic you 
wish us to treat?'' 

" Oh," he said, rising, " you have put it quite out 
of my head; I've been so absorbed in what you were 
saying. But may I ask just where in your treatment 
of the theme your irony ends?" 

" Where yours begins," we neatly responded. 



VIII 

HAVING JUST GOT HOME 

The air of having just got home from Europe was 
very evident in the friend who came to interview him- 
self with us the other day. It was not, of course, so 
distinguishing as it would have been in an age of less 
transatlantic travel, but still, as we say, it was evident, 
and it lent him a superiority which he could not wholly 
conceal. His superiority, so involuntary, would, if he 
had wished to dissemble, have affirmed itself in the 
English cut of his clothes and in the habit of his top- 
hat, which was so newly from a London shop as not yet 
to have lost the whiteness of its sweat-band. But his 
difference from ourselves appeared most in a certain 
consciousness of novel impressions, which presently es- 
caped from him in the critical tone of his remarks. 

" Well," we said, with our accustomed subtlety, 
" how do you find your fellow-savages on returning 
to them after a three months' absence V 9 

" Don't ask me yet," he answered, laying his hat 
down on a pile of rejected MSS., delicately, so as 
not to dim the lustre of its nap. " I am trying to 
get used to them, and I have no doubt I shall succeed 
in time. But I would rather not be hurried in my 
opinions." 

" You find some relief from the summer's accumula- 
tion of sky-scrapers amid the aching void of our man- 
ners ?" we suggested. 

77 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

" Oh, the fresh sky-scrapers are not so bad. You 
won't find the English objecting to them half so much 
as some of our own fellows. But you are all right 
about the aching void of manners. That is truly the 
bottomless pit with us." 

" You think we get worse ?" 

" I don't say that, exactly. How could we V* 

" It might be difficult." 

" I will tell you what," he said, after a moment's 
muse. " There does not seem to be so much an increase 
of bad manners, or no manners, as a diffusion. The 
foreigners who come to us in hordes, but tolerably civil 
hordes, soon catch the native unmannerliness, and are 
as rude as the best of us, especially the younger gen- 
erations. The older people, Italians, Czechs, Poles, 
Greeks, Assyrians, or whatever nationalities now com- 
pose those hordes, remain somewhat in the tradition of 
their home civility; but their children, their grand- 
children, pick up our impoliteness with the first words 
of our language, or our slang, which they make their 
adoptive mother-tongue long before they realize that 
it is slang. When they do realize it, they still like it 
better than language, and as no manners are easier than 
manners, they prefer the impoliteness they find waiting 
them here. I have no doubt that their morals improve ; 
we have morals and to spare. They learn to carry 
pistols instead of knives; they shoot instead of stab- 
bing." 

" Have you been attacked with any particular 
type of revolver since your return ?" we inquired, 
caustically. 

" I have been careful not to give offence." 

" Then why are you so severe upon your fellow- 
savages, especially the minors of foreign extrac- 
tion ?" 

78 



HAVING JUST GOT HOME 

" I was giving the instances which I supposed I was 
asked for; and I am only saying that I have found 
our manners merely worse quantitatively, or in the 
proportion of our increasing population. But this 
prompt succession of the new Americans to the heri- 
tage of the old Americans is truly grievous. They must 
so soon outnumber us, three to one, ten to one, twenty, 
fifty, and they must multiply our incivilities in geo- 
metrical ratio. At Boston, where I landed — " 

" Oh, you landed at Boston !" we exclaimed, as if 
this accounted for everything; but we were really only 
trying to gain time. " If you had landed at ISTew 
York, do you think your sensibilities would have suf- 
fered in the same degree ?" We added, inconsequently 
enough, " We always supposed that Boston was ex- 
emplary in the matters you are complaining of." 

" And when you interrupted me, with a want of 
breeding which is no doubt national rather than in- 
dividual, I was going on to say that I found much al- 
leviation from a source whose abundant sweetness I had 
forgotten. I mean the sort of caressing irony which 
has come to be the most characteristic expression of 
our native kindliness. There can be no doubt of our 
kindliness. Whatever we Americans of the old race- 
suicidal stock are not, we are kind; and I think that 
our expression of our most national mood has acquired 
a fineness, a delicacy, with our people of all degrees, 
unknown to any other irony in the world. Do you 
remember The House with the Green Shutters — I can 
never think of the book without a pang of personal 
grief for the too-early death of the author — how the 
bitter, ironical temper of the Scotch villagers is real- 
ized ? Well, our ironical temper is just the antithesis 
of that. It is all sweetness, but it is of the same origin 
as that of those terrible villagers: it comes from that 

79 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

perfect, that familiar understanding, that penetrating 
reciprocal intelligence, of people who have lived inti- 
mately in one another's lives, as people in small com- 
munities do. We are a small community thrown up 
large, as they say of photographs; we are not so much 
a nation as a family; we each of us know just what 
any other, or all others, of us intend to the finest shade 
of meaning, by the lightest hint." 

" Ah !" we breathed, quite as if we were a character 
in a novel which had inspired the author with a new 
phrase. " Now you are becoming interesting. Should 
yon mind giving a few instances V 9 

" Well, that is not so easy. But I may say that the 
friendly ironies began for us as soon as we were out 
of the more single-minded keeping of the ship's stew- 
ards, who had brought our hand-baggage ashore, and, 
after extracting the last shilling of tip from us, had 
delivered us over to the keeping of the customs officers. 
It began with the joking tone of the inspectors, who 
surmised that we were not trying to smuggle a great 
value into the country, and with their apologetic re- 
grets for bothering us to open so many trunks. They 
implied that it was all a piece of burlesque, which we 
were bound mutually to carry out for the gratification 
of a Government which enjoyed that kind of thing. 
They indulged this whim so far as to lift out the trays, 
to let the Government see that there was nothing duti- 
able underneath, where they touched or lifted the con- 
tents with a mocking hand, and at times carried the 
joke so far as to have some of the things removed. But 
they helped put them back with a smile for the odd 
taste of the Government. I do not suppose that an 
exasperating duty was ever so inexasperatingly ful- 
filled." 

" Aren't you rather straining to make out a case ? 

80 



HAVING JUST GOT HOME 

We have heard of travellers who had a very different 
experience." 

" At Xew York, yes, where we are infected with the 
foreign singleness more than at Boston. Perhaps a 
still livelier illustration of onr ironical temperament 
was given me once before when I brought some things 
into Boston. There were some Swiss pewters, which 
the officers joined me for a moment in trying to make 
out were more than two hundred years old ; but failing, 
jocosely levied thirty per cent, ad valorem on them; 
and then in the same gay spirit taxed me twenty per 
cent, on a medallion of myself done by an American 
sculptor, who had forgotten to verify an invoice of it 
before the American consul at the port of shipment." 

" It seems to us," we suggested, " that this was a 
piece of dead earnest." 

" The fact was earnest," our friend maintained, 
"but the spirit in which it was realized was that of 
a brotherly persuasion that I would see the affair in 
its true light, as a joke that was on me. It was a joke 
that cost me thirty dollars." 

" Still, we fail to see the irony of the transaction." 

" Possibly," our friend said, after a moment's muse, 
" I am letting my sense of another incident color the 
general event too widely. But before I come to that 
I wish to allege some proofs of the national irony 
which I received on two occasions when landing in 
^New York. On the first of these occasions the com- 
missioner who came aboard the steamer, to take the 
sworn declaration of the passengers that they were not 
smugglers, recognized my name as that of a well-known 
financier who had been abroad for a much-needed rest, 
and personally welcomed me home in such terms that 
I felt sure of complete exemption from the duties levied 

on others. When we landed I found that this good 

81 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

friend had looked out for me to the extent of getting me 
the first inspector, and he had guarded my integrity 
to the extent of committing me to a statement in sev- 
eralty of the things my family had nought abroad, so 
that I had to pay twenty-eight dollars on my daughter's 
excess of the hundred dollars allowed free, although 
my wife was bringing in only seventy - five dollars' 
value, and I less than fifty." 

" You mean that you had meant to lump the im- 
ports and escape the tax altogether ?" we asked. 

" Something like that." 

" And the officer's idea of caressing irony was to let 
you think you could escape equally well by being per- 
fectly candid ?" 

" Something like that." 

" And what was the other occasion ?" 

" Oh, it was when I had a letter to the customs of- 
ficer, and he said it would be all right, and then fur- 
nished me an inspector who opened every piece of my 
baggage just as if I had been one of the wicked." 

We could not help laughing, and our friend grinned 
appreciatively. " And what was that supreme instance 
of caressing irony which you experienced in Boston?" 
we pursued. 

" Ah, there is something I don't think you can ques- 
tion. But I didn't experience it; I merely observed 
it. We were coming down the stairs to take our hack 
at the foot of the pier, and an elderly lady who was 
coming down with us found the footing a little in- 
secure. The man in charge bade her be careful, and 
then she turned upon him in severe reproof, and scolded 
him well. She told him that he ought to have those 
stairs looked after, for otherwise somebody would be 
killed one of these days. * Well, ma'am,' he said, ' I 

shouldn't like that. I was in a railroad accident once. 

82 



HAVING JUST GOT HOME 

But I tell you what you do. The next time you come 
over here, you just telephone me, and I'll have these 
steps fixed. Or, I'll tell you : you just write me a letter 
and let me know exactly how you want 'em fixed, and 
I'll see to it myself.' " 

" That was charming," we had to own, " and it was 
of an irony truly caressing, as you say. Do you think 
it was exactly respectful ?" 

" It was affectionate, and I think the lady liked it as 
much as any of us, or as the humorist himself." 

" Yes, it was just so her own son might have joked 
her," we assented. " But tell us, Croesus," we con- 
tinued, in the form of Socratic dialogue, " did you find 
at Boston that multiple unmannerliness which you say 
is apparent from the vast increase of adoptive citizens ? 
We have been in the habit of going to Boston when 
we wished to refresh our impression that we had a 
native country; when we wished to find ourselves in 
the midst of the good old American faces, which were 
sometimes rather arraigning in their expression, but 
not too severe for the welfare of a person imaginably 
demoralized by a New York sojourn." 

Our friend allowed himself time for reflection. " I 
don't think you could do that now with any great hope 
of success. I should say that the predominant face in 
Boston now was some type of Irish face. You know 
that the civic affairs of Boston are now in the hands 
of the Irish. And with reason, if the Irish are in the 
majority." 

" In New York it has long been the same without 
the reason," we dreamily suggested. 

" In Boston," our friend went on, without regarding 
us, " the Catholics outvote the Protestants, and not 
because they vote oftener, but because there are more 
of them." 

83 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

" And the heavens do not fall V 9 

" It is not a question of that ; it is a question of 
whether the Irish are as amiable and civil as the 
Americans, now they are on top." 

" We always supposed they were one of the most 
amiable and civil of the human races. Surely you 
found them so?" 

" I did at Queenstown, but at Boston I had not the 
courage to test the fact. I would not have liked to try 
a joke with one of them as I would at Queenstown, or 
as I would at Boston with an American. Their faces 
did not arraign me, but they forbade me. It was very 
curious, and I may have misread them." 

" Oh, probably not," we lightly mocked. " They 
were taking it out of you for ages of English oppres- 
sion ; they were making you stand for the Black Crom- 
well." 

" Oh, very likely," our friend said, in acceptance of 
our irony, because he liked irony so much. " But, all 
the same, I thought it a pity, as I think it a pity when 
I meet a surly Italian here, who at home would be so 
sweet and gentle. It is somehow our own fault. We 
have spoiled them by our rudeness; they think it is 
American to be as rude as the Americans. They mis- 
take our incivility for our liberty." 

" There is something in what you say," we agreed, 
" if you will allow us to be serious. They are here 
in our large, free air, without the parasites that kept 
them in bounds in their own original habitat. We must 
invent some sort of culture which shall be constructive 
and not destructive, and will supply the eventual good 
without the provisional evil." 

" Then we must go a great way back, and begin with 

our grandfathers, with the ancestors who freed us from 

Great Britain, but did not free themselves from the 

84 



HAVING JUST GOT HOME 

illusion that equality resides in incivility and honesty 
in bluntness. That was something they transmitted to 
us intact, so that we are now not only the best-hearted 
but the worst-mannered of mankind. If our habitual 
carriage were not rubber-tired by irony, we should be 
an intolerable offence, if not to the rest of the world, 
at least to ourselves. By-the-way, since I came back 
I have been reading a curious old book by James Feni- 
more Cooper, which I understand made a great stir in 
its day. Do you know it? — Home as Found?" 

" We know it as one may know a book which one 
has not read. It pretty nearly made an end of James 
Fenimore Cooper, we believe. His fellow-countrymen 
fell on him, tooth and nail. We didn't take so kindly to 
criticism in those days as we do now, when it merely 
tickles the fat on our ribs, and we respond with the 
ironic laughter you profess to like so much. What is 
the drift of the book besides the general censure ¥* 

" Oh, it is the plain, dull tale of an American fam- 
ily returning home after a long sojourn in Europe so 
high-bred that you want to kill them, and so superior 
to their home-keeping countrymen that, vulgarity for 
vulgarity, you much prefer the vulgarity of the Amer- 
icans who have not been away. The author's uncon- 
sciousness of the vulgarity of his exemplary people is 
not the only amusing thing in the book. They arrive 
for a short stay in New York before they go to their 
country-seat somewhere up the State, and the sketches 
of New York society as it was in the third or fourth 
decade of the nineteenth century are certainly delight- 
ful: society was then so exactly like what it is now in 
spirit. Of course, it was very provincial, but society 
is always and everywhere provincial. One thing about 
it then was different from what it is now: I mean the 
attitude of the stav-at-homes toward the been-abroads. 

85 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

They revered them and deferred to them, and they 
called them Hajii, or travellers, in a cant which must 
have been very common, since George William Curtis 
used the same Oriental term for his Howadji in Syria 
and his Nile Notes of a Howadji. 77 

" We must read it," we said, with the readiness of 
one who never intends to read the book referred to. 
" What you say of it is certainly very suggestive. But 
how do you account for the decay of the reverence and 
deference in which the Hajii were once held?" 

" Well, they may have overworked their superiority." 

" Or ?" we prompted. 

" The stay - at - homes may have got onto the been- 
abroads in a point where we all fail, unless we have 
guarded ourselves very scrupulously." 

" And that is ?" 

" There is something very vulgarizing for Amer- 
icans in the European atmosphere, so that we are apt 
to come back worse-mannered than we went away, and 
vulgarer than the untravelled, in so far as it is im- 
porter to criticise than to be criticised." 

" And is that why your tone has been one of uni- 
versal praise for your countrymen in the present inter- 
view ?" 

Our friend reached for his hat, smoothed a ruffled 
edge of the crown, and blew a speck of dust from it. 
"One reasons to a conclusion," he said, "not from it." 



IX 

NEW YORK TO THE HOME-COMER'S EYE 

Our friend came in with challenge in his eye, and 
though a month had passed, we knew, as well as if it 
were only a day, that he had come to require of us the 
meaning in that saying of ours that New York derived 
her inspiration from the future, or would derive it, if 
she ever got it. 

" Well," he said, " have you cleared your mind yet 
sufficiently to ' pour the day ' on mine ? Or hadn't you 
any meaning in what you said ? I've sometimes sus- 
pected it." 

The truth is that we had not had very much mean- 
ing of the sort that you stand and deliver, though we 
were aware of a large, vague wisdom in our words. 
But we perceived that our friend had no intention of 
helping us out, and on the whole we thought it best 
to temporize. 

" In the first place," we said, " we should like to 
know what impression New York made on you when 
you arrived here, if there was any room left on your 
soul-surface after the image of Boston had been im- 
printed there." 

No man is unwilling to expatiate concerning himself, 
even when he is trying to corner a fellow-man. This 
principle of human nature perhaps accounts for the 
frequent failure of thieves to catch thieves, in spite 

87 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

of the proverb ; the pursuit suggests somehow the pleas- 
ures of autobiography, and while they are reminded of 
this and that the suspects escape the detectives. Our 
friend gladly paused to reply : 

" I wish I could say ! It was as unbeautiful as it 
could be, but it was wonderful! Has anybody else 
ever said that there is no place like it? On some ac- 
counts I am glad there isn't; one place of the kind is 
enough; but what I mean is that I went about all the 
next day after arriving from Boston, with Europe still 
in my brain, and tried for something suggestive of some 
other metropolis, and failed. There was no question of 
Boston, of course; that was clean out of it after my 
first glimpse of Fifth Avenue in taxicabbing hotelward 
from the Grand Central Station. But I tried with 
Berlin, and found it a drearier Boston; with Paris, 
and found it a blonder and blither Boston; with Lon- 
don, and found it sombrely irrelevant and incompar- 
able. New York is like London only in not being like 
any other place, and it is next to London in magnitude. 
So far, so good ; but the resemblance ends there, though 
New York is oftener rolled in smoke, or mist, than 
we willingly allow to Londoners. Both, however, have 
an admirable quality which is not beauty. One might 
call the quality picturesque immensity in London, and 
in New York one might call it — " 

He compressed his lips, and shut his eyes to a fine 
line for the greater convenience of mentally visioning. 

" What ?" we impatiently prompted. 

" I was going to say, sublimity. What do you think 
of sublimity?" 

" We always defend New York against you. We ac- 
cept sublimity. How V 9 

" I was thinking of the drive up or down Fifth Ave- 
nue, the newer Fifth Avenue, which has risen in marble 

88 



TO THE HOME-COMER'S EYE 

and Indiana limestone from the brownstone and brick 
of a former age, the Augustan Fifth Avenue which has 
replaced that old Lincolnian Fifth Avenue. You get 
the effect best from the top of one of the imperial 
motor-omnibuses which have replaced the consular two- 
horse stages; and I should say that there was more 
sublimity to the block between Sixteenth Street and 
Sixtieth than in the other measures of the city's extent." 

" This is very gratifying to us as a fond New- 
Yorker; but why leave out of the reach of sublimity 
the region of the sky - scrapers, and the spacious, if 
specious, palatiality of the streets on the upper West 
Side?" 

" I don't, altogether," our friend replied. " Es- 
pecially I don't leave out the upper West Side. That 
has moments of being even beautiful. But there is a 
point beyond which sublimity cannot go; and that is 
about the fifteenth story. When you get a group of 
those sky-scrapers, all soaring beyond this point, you 
have, in an inverted phase, the unimpressiveness which 
Taine noted as the real effect of a prospect from the 
summit of a very lofty mountain. The other day I 
found myself arrested before a shop-window by a large 
photograph labelled ( The Heart of New York.' It 
was a map of that region of sky-scrapers which you 
seem to think not justly beyond the scope of attributive 
sublimity. It was a horror; it set my teeth on edge; 
it made me think of scrap-iron — heaps, heights, pin- 
nacles of scrap-iron. Don't ask me why scrap-iron! 
Go and look at that photograph and you will under- 
stand. Below those monstrous cliffs the lower roofs 
were like broken foot-hills; the streets were chasms, 
gulches, gashes. It looked as if there had been a con- 
flagration, and the houses had been burned into the 
cellars ; and the eye sought the nerve-racking tangle of 
7 89 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

pipe and wire which remains among the ruins after a 
great fire. Perhaps this was what made me think of 
scrap-iron — heaps, heights, pinnacles of it. No, there 
was no sublimity there. Some astronomers have lat- 
terly assigned bounds to immensity, but the sky-scrapers 
go beyond these bounds; they are primordial, abnor- 
mal." 

" You strain for a phrase," we said, " as if you felt 
the essential unreality of your censure. Aren't you 
aware that mediaeval Florence, mediaeval Siena, must 
have looked, with their innumerable towers, like our 
sky - scrapered New York % They must have looked 
quite like it." 

" And very ugly. It was only when those towers, 
which were devoted to party warfare as ours are de- 
voted to business warfare, were levelled, that Florence 
became fair and Siena superb. I should not object 
to a New York of demolished sky - scrapers. They 
would make fine ruins; I would like to see them as 
ruins. In fact, now I think of it, ' The Heart of New 
York ' reminded me of the Roman Forum. I wonder 
I didn't think of that before. But if you want sub- 
limity, the distinguishing quality of New York, as I 
feel it more and more, while I talk of it, you must 
take that stretch of Fifth A venue from a motor-bus 
top." 

" But that stretch of Fifth Avenue abounds in sky- 
scrapers!" we lamented the man's inconsistency. 

" Sky-scrapers in subordination, yes. There is one 
to every other block. There is that supreme sky- 
scraper, the Flatiron. But just as the Flat iron, since 
the newspapers have ceased to celebrate its pranks with 
men's umbrellas, and the feathers and flounces and 
i tempestuous petticoats ' of the women, has sunk back 
into a measurable inconspicuity, so all the other tall 

90 



TO THE HOME-COMER'S EYE 

buildings have somehow harmonized themselves with 
the prospect and no longer form the barbarous archi- 
tectural chaos of lower New York. I don't object 
to their being mainly business houses and hotels; I 
think that it is much more respectable than being pal- 
aces or war-like eminences, Guelf or Ghibelline ; and 
as I ride up-town in my motor-bus, I thrill with their 
grandeur and glow with their condescension. Yes, they 
condescend; and although their tall white flanks climb 
in the distance, they seem to sink on nearer approach, 
and amiably decline to disfigure the line of progress, 
or to dwarf the adjacent edifices. Down-town, in the 
heart of New York, poor old Trinity looks driven into 
the ground by the surrounding heights and bulks; but 
along my sublime upper Fifth Avenue there is spire 
after spire that does not unduly dwindle, but looks as 
if tenderly, reverently, protected by the neighboring 
giants. They are very good and kind giants, appar- 
ently. But the acme of the sublimity, the quality in 
which I find my fancy insisting more and more, is in 
those two stately hostelries, the Gog and Magog of that 
giant company, which guard the approach to the Park 
like mighty pillars, the posts of vast city gates folded 
back from them/' 

"Come!" we said. "This is beginning to be some- 
thing like." 

" In November," our friend said, taking breath for 
a fresh spurt of praise, " there were a good many sym- 
pathetic afternoons which lent themselves to motor- 
bus progress up that magnificent avenue, and if you 
mounted to your place on top, about three o'clock, you 
looked up or down the long vista of blue air till it 
turned mirk at either vanishing-point under a sky of 
measureless cloudlessness. That dimness, almost smoki- 
ness at the closes of the prospect, was something un- 

91 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

speakably rich. It made me think, quite out of relation 
or relevance, of these nobly mystical lines of Keats : 

'His soul shall know the sadness of her night, 
And be among her cloudy trophies hung/ " 

We closed our eyes in the attempt to grope after 
him. "Explain, O Howadji!" 

" I would rather not, as you say when you can't/' 
he replied. " But I will come down a little nearer 
earth, if you prefer. Short of those visionary dis- 
tances there are features of the prospect either way in 
which I differently rejoice. One thing is the shining 
black roofs of the cabs, moving and pausing like pro- 
cessions of huge turtles up and down the street; obey- 
ing the gesture of the mid-stream policemen where they 
stand at the successive crossings to stay them, and float- 
ing with the coming and going tides as he drops his 
inhibitory hand and speeds them in the continuous 
current. That is, of course, something you get in 
greater quantity, though not such intense quality, in 
a London ' block,' but there is something more fluent, 
more mercurially impatient, in a New York street 
jam, which our nerves more vividly partake. Don't 
ask me to explain! I would rather not!" he said, and 
we submitted. 

He went on to what seemed an unjustifiable remove 
from the point. " Nothing has struck me so much, 
after a half-year's absence, in this novel revelation of 
sublimity in New York, as the evident increase on the 
street crowds. The city seems to have grown a whole 
new population, and the means of traffic and trans- 
portation have been duplicated in response to the de- 
mand of the multiplying freights and feet." Our 
friend laughed in self-derision, as he went on. " I 

92 



TO THE HOME-COMEK'S EYE 

remember when we first began to have the electric 
trolleys — " 

" Trams, we believe you call them/' we insinuated. 

" Isot when I'm on this side/' he retorted, and he 
resumed : " I used to be afraid to cross the avenues 
where they ran. At certain junctions I particularly 
took my life in my hand, and my ' courage in both 
hands/ Where Sixth Avenue flows into Fifty-ninth 
Street, and at Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, 
and at Dead Man's Curve (he has long been resus- 
citated) on Fourteenth Street, I held my breath till 
I got over alive, and I blessed Heaven for my safe 
passage at Forty-second and Twenty-third streets, and 
at divers places on Third Avenue. JSTow I regard these 
interlacing iron currents with no more anxiety than I 
would so many purling brooks, with stepping-stones in 
them to keep my feet from the wet : they are like gentle 
eddies — soft, clear, slow tides — where one may pause 
in the midst at will, compared with the deadly expanses 
of Fifth Avenue, with their rush of all manner of 
vehicles over the smooth asphalt surface. There I 
stand long at the brink; I look for a policeman to 
guide and guard my steps; I crane my neck forward 
from my coign of vantage and count the cabs, the taxi- 
cabs, the carriages, the private automobiles, the motor- 
buses, the express-wagons, and calculate my chances. 
Then I shrink back. If it is a corner where there is 
no policeman to bank the tides up on either hand and 
lead me over, I wait for some bold, big team to make 
the transit of the avenue from the cross-street, and 
then in its lee I find my way to the other side. As 
for the trolleys, I now mock myself of them, as Thack- 
eray's Frenchmen were said to say in their peculiar 
English. (I wonder if they really did?) It is the 
taxicabs that now turn my heart to water. It is aston- 

93 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

ishing how they have multiplied — they have multi- 
plied even beyond the ratio of our self-reduplicating 
population. There are so many already that this morn- 
ing I read in my paper of a trolley-car striking a horse- 
cab! The reporter had written quite unconsciously, 
just as he used to write horseless carriage. Yes, the 
motor-cab is now the type, the norm, and the horse-cab 
is the — the — the — " 

He hesitated for the antithesis, and we proposed 
"Abnorm?" 

" Say abnorm ! It is hideous, but I don't know that 
it is wrong. Where was I V 

" You had got quite away from the sublimity of New 
York, which upon the whole you seemed to attribute to 
the tall buildings along "Fifth Avenue. We should like 
you to explain again why, if ' The Heart of New York/ 
with its sky-scrapers, made you think of scrap-iron, the 
Flatiron soothed your lacerated sensibilities V 

" The Flatiron is an incident, an accent merely, in 
the mighty music of the Avenue, a happy discord that 
makes for harmony. It is no longer nefarious, or even 
mischievous, now the reporters have got done attribu- 
ting a malign meteorological influence to it. I wish 
I could say as much for the white marble rocket pres- 
ently soaring up from the east side of Madison Square, 
and sinking the beautiful reproduction of the Giralda 
tower in the Garden half-way into the ground. As I 
look at this pale yellowish brown imitation of the 
Seville original, it has a pathos which I might not 
make you feel. But I would rather not look away 
from Fifth Avenue at all. It is astonishing how that 
street has assumed and resumed all the larger and 
denser life of the other streets. Certain of the ave- 
nues, like Third and Sixth, remain immutably and 

characteristically noisy and ignoble ; and Fifth Avenue 

94 



TO THE HOME-COMER'S EYE 

has not reduced them to insignificance as it has Broad- 
way. That is now a provincial High Street beside its 
lordlier compeer; but I remember when Broadway 
stormed and swarmed with busy life. Why, I re- 
member the party-colored 'buses which used to thun- 
der up and down; and I can fancy some Rip Van 
Winkle of the interior returning to the remembered 
terrors and splendors of that mighty thoroughfare, 
and expecting to be killed at every crossing — I can 
fancy such a visitor looking round in wonder at 
the difference and asking the last decaying sur- 
vivor of the famous Broadway Squad what they had 
done with Broadway from the Battery to Madison 
Square. Beyond that, to be sure, there is a mighty flare 
of electrics blazoning the virtues of the popular beers, 
whiskeys, and actresses, which might well mislead my 
elderly revisitor with the belief that Broadway was 
only taken in by day, and was set out again after dark 
in its pristine — I think pristine is the word ; it used to 
be — glory. But even by night that special length of 
Broadway lacks the sublimity of Fifth Avenue, as I 
see it or imagine it from my motor-bus top. I knew 
Fifth Avenue in the Lincolnian period of brick and 
brownstone, when it had a quiet, exclusive beauty, the 
beauty of the unbroken sky-line and the regularity of 
facade which it has not yet got back, and may never 
get. You will get some notion of it still in Madison 
Avenue, say from Twenty - eighth to Forty - second 
streets, and perhaps you will think it was dull as well 
as proud. It is proud now, but it is certainly not dull. 
There is something of columnar majesty in the lofty 
flanks of these tall shops and hotels as you approach 
them, which makes you think of some capital decked 
for a national holiday. But in Fifth Avenue it is 
always holiday — " 

95 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

" Enough of streets !" we cried, impatiently. " Now, 
what of men ? What of that heterogeneity for which 
New York is famous, or infamous ? You noticed the 
contrasting Celtic and Pelasgic trihes in Boston. What 
of them here, with all the tribes of Israel, lost and 
found, and the ' sledded Polack,' the Czech, the Hun, 
the German, the Gaul, the Gothic and Iberian Span- 
iard, and the swart stranger from our sister continent 
to the southward, and the islands of the seven seas, 
who so sorely outnumber us V 9 

Our friend smiled thoughtfully. " Why, that is 
very curious! Do you know that in Fifth Avenue 
the American type seems to have got back its old su- 
premacy ? It is as if no other would so well suit with 
that sublimity! I have not heard that race-suicide has 
been pronounced by the courts amenable to our wise 
State law against felo de se, but in the modern Fifth 
Avenue it is as if our stirp had suddenly reclaimed 
its old-time sovereignty. I don't say that there are 
not other faces, other tongues than ours to be seen, 
heard, there; far from it! But I do say it is a sense 
of the American face, the American tongue, which pre- 
vails. Once more, after long exile in the streets of our 
own metropolis, you find yourself in an American city. 
Your native features, your native accents, have re- 
turned in such force from abroad, or have thronged 
here in such multitude from the prospering Pittsburgs, 
Cincinnatis, Chicagos, St. Louises, and San Franciscos 
of the West, that you feel as much at home in Fifth 
Avenue as you would in Piccadilly, or in the Champs 
Ely sees, or on the Pincian Hill. Yes, it is very 
curious." 

" Perhaps," we suggested, after a moment's reflec- 
tion, " it isn't true." 



X 

CHEAPNESS OF THE COSTLIEST CITY ON EARTH 

" One of my surprises on Getting Back," the more 
or less imaginary interlocutor who had got back from 
Europe said in his latest visit to the Easy Chair, " is 
the cheapness of the means of living in New York." 

At this the Easy Chair certainly sat up. " Stay not 
a moment, Howadji," we exclaimed, " in removing our 
deep-seated prepossession that New York is the most 
expensive place on the planet." 

But instead of instantly complying our friend fell 
into a smiling muse, from which he broke at last to 
say : " I have long been touched by the pathos of a 
fact which I believe is not yet generally known. Do 
you know yourself, with the searching knowledge which 
is called feeling it in your bones, that a good many 
Southerners and Southerly Westerners make this town 
their summer resort ?" We intimated that want of 
penetrating statistics which we perceived would gratify 
him, and he went on. " They put up at our hotels 
which in the c anguish of the solstice ? they find in- 
vitingly vacant. As soon as they have registered the 
clerk recognizes them as Colonel, or Major, or Judge, 
but gives them the rooms which no amount of family or 
social prestige could command in the season, and there 
they stay, waking each day from unmosquitoed nights 
to iced-melon mornings, until a greater anguish is tele- 

97 



IMAGINAKY INTEEVIEWS 

graphed forward by the Associated Press.. Then they 
turn their keys in their doors, and flit to the neighbor- 
ing Atlantic or the adjacent Catskills, till the solstice 
recovers a little, and then they return to their hotel 
and resume their life in the city, which they have al- 
most to themselves, with its parks and drives and roof- 
gardens and vaudevilles, unelbowed by the three or 
four millions of natives whom we leave behind us 
when we go to Europe, or Newport, or Bar Harbor, or 
the Adirondacks. Sometimes they take furnished flats 
along the Park, and settle into a greater permanency 
than their hotel sojourn implies. They get the flats 
at about half the rent paid by the lessees who- sublet 
them, but I call it pathetic that they should count it 
joy to come where we should think it misery to stay. 
Still, everything is comparative, and I suppose they 
are as reasonably happy in ]STew York as I am in my 
London lodgings in the London season, where I some- 
times stifle in a heat not so pure and clear as that I 
have fled from." 

" Very well/' we said, dryly, " you have established 
the fact that the Southerners come here for the sum- 
mer and live in great luxury; but what has that to do 
with the cheapness of living in New York, which you 
be^an by boasting V 9 

" Ah, I was coming back to that," the Howadji said, 
with a glow of inspiration. u I have been imagining, 
in the relation which you do not see, that New York 
can be made the inexpensive exile of its own children 
as it has been made the summer home of those sym- 
pathetic Southerners. If I can establish the fact of its 
potential cheapness, as I think I can, I shall deprive 
them of some reasons for going abroad, though I'm not 
sure they will thank me, when the reasons for Europe 
are growing fewer and fewer. Culture can now be 

98 



THE COSTLIEST CITY ON EARTH 

acquired almost as advantageously here as there. Ex- 
cept for the ' monuments/ in which we include all 
ancient and modern masterpieces in the several arts, 
we have no excuse for going to Europe, and even in 
these masterpieces Europe is coming to us so increas- 
ingly in every manner of reproduction that we allege 
the monuments almost in vain. The very ruins of the 
past are now so accurately copied in various sorts of 
portable plasticity that we may know them here with 
nearly the same emotion as on their own ground. The 
education of their daughters which once availed wuth 
mothers willing to sacrifice themselves and their hus- 
bands to the common good, no longer avails. The 
daughters know the far better time they will have at 
home, and refuse to go, as far as daughters may, and 
in our civilization this, you know, is very far. But it 
was always held a prime reason and convincing argu- 
ment that Dresden, Berlin, Paris, Kome, and even 
London, were so much cheaper than New York that 
it was a waste of money to stay at home." 

" Well, wasn't it ?" we impatiently demanded. 

" I will not say, for I needn't, as yet. There were 
always at the same time philosophers who contended 
that if we lived in those capitals as we lived at home, 
they would be dearer than New York. But what is 
really relevant is the question whether New York isn't 
cheaper now." 

" We thought it had got past a question with you. 
We thought you began by saying that New York is 
cheaper." 

" I can : t believe I was so crude," the Howadji re- 
turned, with a fine annoyance. " That is the con- 
clusion you have characteristically jumped to with- 
out looking before you leap. I was going to approach 
the fact much more delicately, and I don't know but 

99 " 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

what by your haste you have shattered my ideal of the 
conditions. But I'll own that the great stumbling- 
block to my belief that the means of living in New 
York are cheaper than in the European capitals is that 
the house rents here are so incomparably higher than 
they are there. But I must distinguish and say that 
I mean flat-rents, for, oddly enough, flats are much 
dearer than houses. You can get a very pretty little 
house, in a fair quarter, with plenty of light and a good 
deal of sun, for two-thirds and sometimes one-half what 
you must pay for a flat with the same number of rooms, 
mostly dark or dim, and almost never sunny. Of 
course, a house is more expensive and more difficult 
to l run,' but even with the cost of the greater service 
and of the furnace beat the rent does not reach that 
of a far less wholesome and commodious flat. There is 
one thing to be said in favor of a flat, however, and 
that is the women are in favor of it. The feminine 
instinct is averse to stairs; the sex likes to be safely 
housed against burglars, and when it must be left alone, 
it desires the security of neighbors, however strange 
the neighbors may be; it likes the authority of a jan- 
itor, the society of an elevator-boy. It hates a lower 
door, an area, an ash-barrel, and a back yard. But 
if it were willing to confront all these inconveniences, 
it is intimately, it is osseously, convinced that a house 
is not cheaper than a flat. As a matter of fact, neither 
a house nor a flat is cheap enough in New York to 
bear me out in my theory that New York is no more 
expensive than those Old World cities. To aid ef- 
ficiently in my support I must invoke tl.3 prices of 
provisions, which I find, by inquiry at several markets 
on the better avenues, have reverted to the genial level 
of the earlier nineteen-hundreds, before the cattle com- 
bined with the trusts to send them up. I won't prosily 

100 



THE COSTLIEST CITY ON EAETH 

rehearse the quotations of beef, mutton, pork, poultry, 
and fish; they can be had at any dealer's on demand; 
and they will be found less, on the whole, than in Lon- 
don, less than in Paris, less even than in Rome. They 
are greater no doubt than the prices in our large West- 
ern cities, but they are twenty per cent, less than the 
prices in Boston, and in the New England towns which 
hang upon Boston's favor for their marketing. I do 
not know how or why it is that while we wicked New- 
Yorkers pay twenty-five cents for our beefsteak, these 
righteous Bostonians should have to pay thirty, for the 
same cut and quality. Here I give twenty - eight a 
pound for my Java coffee ; in the summer I live near 
an otherwise delightful New Hampshire town where 
I must give thirty-eight. It is strange that the siftings 
of three kingdoms, as the Rev. Mr. Higginson called 
his fellow-Puritans, should have come in their great- 
grandchildren to a harder fate in this than the bran and 
shorts and middlings of such harvestings as the fields 
of Ireland and Italy, of Holland and Hungary, of 
Poland and Transylvania and Muscovy afford. Per- 
haps it is because those siftings have run to such a 
low percentage of the whole New England population 
that they must suffer, along with the refuse of the 
mills — the Mills of the Gods — abounding in our city 
and its dependencies. 

" I don't know how much our housekeepers note the 
fall of the prices in their monthly bills, but in brows- 
ing about for my meals, as I rather like to do, I dis- 
tinctly see it in the restaurant rates. I don't mean the 
restaurants to which the rich or reckless resort, but 
those modester places which consult the means of the 
careful middle class to which I belong. As you know, 
I live ostensibly at the Hotel Universe. I have a room 
there, and that is my address — " 

101 



IMAGINARY INTEEVIEWS 

" We know/' we derisively murmured. " So few of 
our visitors can afford it. 7 ' 

" I can't afford it myself/' our friend said. " But 
I save a little by breakfasting there, and lunching and 
dining elsewhere. Or, I did till the eggs got so bad that 
I had to go out for my breakfast, too. Now I get per- 
fect eggs, of the day before, for half the price that the 
extortionate hens laying for the Universe exact for 
their last week's product. At a very good Broadway 
hotel, which simple strangers from Europe think first 
class, I get a ' combination ' breakfast of fresh eggs, 
fresh butter, and fresh rolls, with a pot of blameless 
Souchong or Ceylon tea, for thirty cents; if I plunge 
to the extent of a baked apple, I pay thirty-five. Do 
you remember what you last paid in Paris or Rome 
for coffee, rolls, and butter ?" 

" A franc fifty," we remembered. 

" And in London for the same with eggs you paid 
one and six, didn't you?" 

" Very likely," we assented. 

" Well, then, you begin to see. There are several 
good restaurants quite near that good hotel where I 
get the same combination breakfast for the same price ; 
and if I go to one of those shining halls which you find 
in a score of places, up and down Broadway and the 
side streets, I get it for twenty-five cents. But though 
those shining halls glare at you with roofs and walls of 
stainless tile and glass, and tables of polished marble, 
their bill of fare is so inflexibly adjusted to the gen- 
eral demand that I cannot get Souchong or Ceylon tea 
for any money; I can only get Oolong; otherwise I 
must take a cup of their excellent coffee. If I wander 
from my wonted breakfast, I can get almost anything 
in the old American range of dishes for five or ten 

cents a portion, and the quality and quantity are both 

102 



THE COSTLIEST CITY ON EARTH 

all I can ask. As I have learned upon inquiry, the 
great basal virtues of these places are good eggs and 
good butter : I like to cut from the thick slice of butter 
under the perfect cube of ice, better than to have my 
butter pawed into balls or cut into shavings, as they 
serve your butter in Europe. But I prefer having a 
small table to myself, with my hat and overcoat vis-a-vis 
on the chair opposite, as I have it at that good hotel. 
In those shining halls I am elbowed by three others at 
my polished marble table ; but if there were more room 
I should never object to the company. It is the good, 
kind, cleanly, comely American average, which is the 
best company in the world, with a more than occasional 
fine head, and faces delicately sculptured by thought 
and study. I address myself fearlessly to the old and 
young of my own sex, without ever a snub such as I 
might get from the self-respectful maids or matrons 
who resort to the shining halls, severally or collectively, 
if I ventured upon the same freedom with them. I 
must say that my commensals lunch or dine as wisely 
as I do for the most part, but sometimes I have had to 
make my tacit criticisms ; and I am glad that I forbore 
one night with a friendly young man at my elbow, who 
had just got his order of butter-cakes — " 

" Butter-cakes ?" we queried. 

" That is what they call a rich, round, tumid product 
of the griddle, which they serve very hot, and open to 
close again upon a large lump of butter. For two of 
those cakes and his coffee my unknown friend paid 
fifteen cents, and made a supper, after which I should 
not have needed to break my fast the next morning. 
But he fearlessly consumed it, and while he ate he 
confided that he was of a minor clerical employ in one 
of the great hotels near by, and when I praised our 
shining hall and its guests he laughed and said he came 

103 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

regularly, and he always saw people there who were 
registered at his hotel: they found it good and they 
found it cheap. I suppose you know that New York 
abounds in tables d'hote of a cheapness unapproached 
in the European capitals V 

We said we had heard so ; at the same time we tried 
to look as if we always dined somewhere in society, 
but Heaven knoAVs whether we succeeded. 

" The combination breakfast is a form of table 
d'hote; and at a very attractive restaurant in a good 
place I have seen such a breakfast — fruit, cereal, eggs, 
rolls, and coffee — offered for fifteen cents. I have 
never tried it, not because I had not the courage, but 
because I thought thirty cents cheap enough; those 
who do not I should still hold worthy of esteem if they 
ate the fifteen-cent breakfast. I have also seen pla- 
carded a ' business men's lunch ' for fifteen cents, 
which also I have not tried ; I am not a business man. 
I make bold to say, however, that I often go for my 
lunch or my dinner to a certain Italian place on a good 
avenue, which I will not locate more definitely lest 
you should think me a partner of the enterprise, for 
fifty and sixty cents, e vino compreso/ The material is 
excellent, and the treatment is artistic ; the company of 
a simple and self-respectful domesticity which I think 
it an honor to be part of: fathers and mothers of fam- 
ilies, aunts, cousins, uncles, grandparents. I do not 
deny a Merry Widow hat here and there, but the face 
under it, though often fair and young, is not a Merry 
Widow face. Those people all look as kind and harm- 
less as the circle which I used to frequent farther down- 
town at a fifty-cent French table d'hote, but with a 
bouillabaisse added which I should not, but for my 
actual experiences, have expected to buy for any money. 
But there are plentv of Italian and French tables 

104 



THE COSTLIEST CITY ON EARTH 

d'hote for the same price all over town. If you venture 
outside of the Latin race, yon pay dearer and you fare 
worse, unless you go to those shining halls which I have 
been praising. If you go to a German place, you get 
grosser dishes and uncouth manners for more money; 
I do not know why that amiable race should be so dear 
and rude in its feeding-places, but that is my experi- 
ence." 

" You wander, you wander !" we exclaimed. " Why 
should we care for your impressions of German cook- 
ing and waiting, unless they go to prove or disprove 
that living in New York is cheaper than in the Euro- 
pean capitals V 9 

" Perhaps I was going to say that even those Ger- 
mans are not so dear as they are in the fatherland, 
though rude. They do not tend much if at all to tables 
d'hote, but the Italians and the French who do, serve 
you a better meal for a lower price than you would 
get in Paris, or Home, or Naples. There the preva- 
lent ideal is five francs, with neither wine nor coffee 
included. I'll allow that the cheap table d'hote is 
mainly the affair of single men and women, and does 
not merit the consideration I've given it. If it helps 
a young couple to do with one maid, or with none, 
instead of two, it makes for cheapness of living. Ser- 
vice is costly and it is greedy, and except in large 
households its diet is the same as the family's, so that 
anything which reduces it is a great saving. But the 
table d'hote which is cheap for one or two is not cheap 
for more, and it is not available if there are children. 
Housing and raw-provisioning and serving are the main 
questions, and in Europe the first and last are appar- 
ently much less expensive. Marketing is undoubtedly 
cheaper with us, and if 'you count in what you get with 
the newness, the wholesomeness, and handiness of an 

8 105 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

American flat, the rent is not so much greater than that 
of a European flat, with its elementary bareness. You 
could not, here, unless you descended from the apart- 
ment to the tenement, hire any quarter where you 
would not be supplied with hot and cold water, with 
steam heating, with a bath-room, and all the rest of it." 

" But," we said, u you are showing that we are more 
comfortably housed than the Europeans, when you 
should be treating the fact of relative cheapness." 

" I was coming to that even in the matter of 
housing — " 

" It is too late to come to it in this paper. You 
have now talked three thousand words, and that is 
the limit. You must be silent for at least another 
month." 

" But if I have something important to say at this 
juncture ? If I may not care to recur to the subject 
a month hence ? If I may have returned to Europe by 
that time ?" 

" Then you can the better verify your statistics. 
But the rule in this place is inflexible. Three thousand 
words, neither more nor less. The wisdom of Solomon 
would be blue-pencilled if it ran to more." 



XI 

WAYS AND MEANS OF LIVING IN NEW YORK 

The Howadji, or the Hajii, as people called his sort 
in the days of Home as Found, was prompt to the 
hour when his month's absence was up, and he began 
without a moment's delay: i[ But of course the lion in 
the way of my thesis that New York is comparatively 
cheap is the rent, the rent of flats or houses in the parts 
of the town where people of gentle tastes and feelings 
are willing to live. Provisions are cheap ; furnishings 
of all kinds are cheap; service, especially when you 
mainly or wholly dispense with it, is cheap, for one 
maid here will do the work of two abroad, and if the 
mistress of the house does her own work she can make 
the modern appliances her handmaids at no cost what- 
ever. It is ridiculous, in fact, leaving all those beauti- 
ful and ingenious helps in housework to the hirelings 
who work only twice as hard with them for more wages 
than the hirelings of countries where they don't exist." 

" Don't be so breathless," we interposed. " You will 
only be allowed to talk three thousand words, whether 
you talk fast or slow, and you might as well take your 
ease." 

" That is true," the Howadji reflected. " But I am 
full of my subject, and I have the feeling that I am 
getting more out, even if I can't get more in, by talk- 
ing fast. The rent question itself," he hurried on, 

107 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

" has been satisfactorily solved of late in the new in- 
vention of co-operative housing which you may have 
heard of." 

We owned that we had, with the light indifference 
of one whom matters of more money or less did not 
concern, and our friend went on. 

" The plan was invented, you know, by a group of 
artists who imagined putting up a large composite 
dwelling in a street where the cost of land was not 
absolutely throat-cutting, and finishing it with tasteful 
plainness in painted pine and the like, but equipping 
it with every modern convenience in the interest of 
easier housekeeping. The characteristic and impera- 
tive fact of each apartment was a vast and lofty studio 
whose height was elsewhere divided into two floors, 
and so gave abundant living-rooms in little space. The 
proprietorial group may have been ten, say, but the 
number of apartments was twice as many, and the basic 
hope was to let the ten other apartments for rents which 
would carry the expense of the whole, and house the 
owners at little or no cost. The curious fact is that 
this apparently too simple-hearted plan worked. The 
Philistines, as the outsiders may be called, liked being 
near the self -chosen people; they liked the large life- 
giving studio which imparted light and air to the two 
floors of its rearward division, and they eagerly paid 
the sustaining rents. The fortunate experience of one 
aesthetic group moved others to like enterprises; and 
now there are eight or ten of these co-operative studio 
apartment-houses in different parts of the town." 

" With the same fortunate experience for the own- 
ers?" we queried, with suppressed sarcasm. 

" Not exactly," our friend assented to our intention. 
" The successive groups have constantly sought more 
central, more desirable, more fashionable situations. 

108 



MEANS OF LIVING IN NEW YORK 

They have built not better than they knew, for that 
could not be, but costlier, and they have finished in 
hard woods, with marble halls and marbleized hall- 
boys, and the first expense has been much greater ; but 
actual disaster has not yet followed; perhaps it is too 
soon ; we must not be impatient ; but what has already 
happened is what happens with other beautiful things 
that the aesthetic invent. It has happened notoriously 
with all the most lovable and livable summer places 
which the artists and authors find out and settle them- 
selves cheaply and tastefully in. The Philistines, a 
people wholly without invention, a cuckoo tribe in- 
capable of self - nesting, stumble upon those joyous 
homes by chance, or by mistaken invitation. They 
submit meekly enough at first to be sub-neighbors ruled 
in all things by the genius of the place; but once in, 
they begin to lay their golden eggs in some humble 
cottage, and then they hatch out broods of palatial 
villas equipped with men and maid servants, horses, 
carriages, motors, yachts; and if the original settlers 
remain it is in a helpless inferiority, a broken spirit, 
and an overridden ideal. This tragical history is the 
same at Magnolia, and at York Harbor, and at Dublin, 
and at Bar Harbor; even at Newport itself; the co- 
operative housing of New York is making a like his- 
tory. It is true that the Philistines do not come in and 
dispossess the autochthonic groups; these will not sell 
to them; but they have imagined doing on a sophisti- 
cated and expensive scale what the aesthetics have done 
simply and cheaply. They are buying the pleasanter 
sites, and are building co-operatively ; though they have 
already eliminated the studio and the central principle, 
and they build for the sole occupancy of the owners. 
But the cost of their housing then is such that it puts 
them out of the range of our inquiry as their riches has 

109 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

already put them beyond the range of our sympathy. 
It still remains for any impecunious group to buy the 
cheaper lots, and build simpler houses on the old studio 
principle, with rents enough to pay the cost of opera- 
tion, and leave the owners merely the interest and taxes, 
with the eventual payment of these also by the tenants. 
Some of the studio apartments are equipped with 
restaurants, and the dwellers need only do such light 
housekeeping as ladies may attempt without disgrace, 
or too much fatigue." 

" Or distraction from their duties to society," we 
suggested. 

" It depends upon what you mean by society ; it's 
a very general and inexact term. If you mean formal 
dinners, dances, parties, receptions, and all that, the 
lightest housekeeping would distract from the duties to 
it; but if you mean congenial friends willing to come 
in for tea in the afternoon, or to a simple lunch, or 
not impossibly a dinner, light housekeeping is not in- 
compatible with a conscientious recognition of society's 
claims. I think of two ladies, sisters, one younger and 
one older than the other, who keep house not lightly, 
but in its full weight of all the meals, for their father 
and Lvother, and yet are most gracefully and most ac- 
ceptably in the sort of society which Jane Austen says 
is, if not good, the best : the society of gifted, cultivated, 
travelled, experienced, high-principled people, capable 
of respecting themselves and respecting their qualities 
wherever they find them in others. These ladies do 
not pretend to i entertain,' but their table is such that 
they are never afraid to ask a friend to it. In a mo- 
ment, if there is not enough or not good enough, one of 
them conjures something attractive out of the kitchen, 
and you sit down to a banquet. The sisters are both 

of that gentle class of semi-invalids whose presence in 

110 



MEANS OF LIVING IN NEW YORK 

our civilization enables us to support the rudeness of 
the general health. They employ aesthetically the beau- 
tiful alleviations with which science has rescued do- 
mestic drudgery from so much of the primal curse; it 
is a pleasure to see them work; it is made so graceful, 
so charming, that you can hardly forbear taking hold 
yourself." 

" But you do forbear," we interposed ; " and do you 
imagine that their example is going to prevail with the 
great average of impecunious American housewives, or 
sisters, or daughters?" 

" No, they will continue to ' keep a girl ' whom they 
will enslave to the performance of duties which they 
would be so much better for doing themselves, both 
in body and mind, for that doing would develop in 
them the hospitable soul of those two dear ladies. They 
will be in terror of the casual guest, knowing well that 
they cannot set before him things fit to eat. They have 
no genius for housekeeping, which is one with home- 
making: they do not love it, and those ladies do love 
it in every detail, so that their simple flat shines 
throughout with a lustre which pervades the kitchen 
and the parlor and the chamber alike. It is the one- 
girl household, or the two - girl, which makes living 
costly because it makes living wasteful ; it is not the 
luxurious establishments of the rich which are to blame 
for our banishment to the mythical cheapness of Eu- 
rope." 

We were not convinced by the eloquence which had 
overheated our friend, and we objected: "But those 
ladies you speak of give their whole lives to house- 
keeping, and ought cheapness to be achieved at such 
an expense?" 

" In the first place, they don't ; and, if they do, what 
do the one-girl or the two-girl housekeepers give their 



IMAGINAKY TNTEEVIEWS 

lives to ? or, for the matter of that, the ten or twenty 
girl housekeepers ? The ladies of whom I speak have 
always read the latest book worth reading; they have 
seen the picture which people worth while are talking 
of; they know through that best society which likes a 
cup of their tea all the aesthetic gossip of the day ; they 
are part of the intellectual movement, that part which 
neither the arts nor the letters can afford to ignore; 
they help to make up the polite public whose opinions 
are the court of final appeal." 

" They strike us," we said, stubbornly, " as rather 
romantic." 

" Ah, there you are ! Well, they are romantic — 
romantic like a gentle poem, like an idyllic tale; but 
I deny that they are romanticistic. Their whole lives 
deal with realities, the every-other-day as well as the 
every-day realities. But the lives of those others who 
make all life costly by refusing their share of its work 
dwell in a web of threadbare fictions which never had 
any color of truth in this country. They are trying to 
imitate poor imitations, to copy those vulgar copies of 
the European ideal which form the society-page's con- 
tribution to the history of our contemporary civiliza- 
tion." 

We were so far moved as to say, " We think we see 
what you mean," and our friend went on. 

" Speaking of civilization, do you know what a genial 
change the tea-room is working in our morals and man- 
ners? There are many interesting phases of its prog- 
ress among us, and not the least interesting of these is 
its being so largely the enterprise of ladies who must 
not only save money, but must earn money, in order to 
live, not cheaply, but at all. Their fearlessness in go- 
ing to work has often the charm of a patrician past, 
for many of them are Southern women who have come 

112 



'MEANS OF LIVING IN NEW YOKK 

to New York to repair their broken fortunes. The 
tea-room has offered itself as a graceful means to this 
end, and they have accepted its conditions, which are 
mainly the more delicate kinds of cookery, with those 
personal and racial touches in which Southern women 
are so expert. But there are tea-rooms managed by 
Western women, if I may judge from the accents in- 
voluntarily overheard in their talk at the telephone. 
The tea of the tea-room means lunch, too, and in some 
places breakfast and dinner, or rather supper, on much 
the plan of the several Women's Exchanges; but these 
are mostly of N~ew England inspiration and operation, 
and their cooking has a Northern quality. They, as 
well as the tea-rooms, leave something to be desired in 
cheapness, though they might be dearer; in some you 
get tea for fifteen cents, in others a no better brew for 
twenty-five. But they are all charmingly peaceful, and 
when at the noon hour they overflow with conversation, 
still there is a prevailing sense of quiet, finely qualified 
by the feminine invention and influence. Mere men 
are allowed to frequent these places, not only under the 
protection of women, but also quite unchaperoned, and 
when one sees them gently sipping their Souchong or 
Oolong, and respectfully munching their toasted muf- 
fins or their chicken-pie, one remembers with tender 
gratitude how recently they would have stood crooking 
their elbows at deleterious bars, and visiting the bowls 
of cheese and shredded fish and crackers to which their 
drink freed them, while it enslaved them to the witchery 
of those lurid ladies contributed by art to the evil at- 
tractions of such places: you see nowhere else ladies 
depicted with so little on, except in the Paris salon. 
The New York tea-rooms are not yet nearly so frequent 
as in London, but I think they are on the average 
cosier, and on the whole I cannot say that they are 

113 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

dearer. They really cheapen the midday meal to many 
who would otherwise make it at hotels and restaurants, 
and, so far as they contribute to the spread of the after- 
noon-tea habit, they actually lessen the cost of living: 
many guests can now be fobbed off with tea who must 
once have been asked to lunch." 

" But," we suggested, " isn't that cheapness at the 
cost of shabbiness, which no one can really afford ?" 

" No, I don't think so. Whatever lightens hos- 
pitality of its cumbrousness makes for civilization, 
which is really more compatible with a refined fru- 
gality than with an unbridled luxury. If every a-la- 
carte restaurant, in the hotels and out of them, could 
be replaced by tea-rooms, and for the elaborate lunches 
and dinners of private life the informality and sim- 
plicity of the afternoon tea were substituted, we should 
all be healthier, wealthier, and wiser ; and I should not 
be obliged to protract this contention for the superior 
cheapness of New York." 

" But, wait !" we said. " There is something just 
occurs to us. If you proved New York the cheapest 
great city in the world, wouldn't it tend to increase our 
population even beyond the present figure, which you 
once found so deplorable ?" 

" No, I imagine not. Or, rather, it would add to 
our population only those who desire to save instead 
of those who desire to waste. We should increase 
through the new-comers in virtuous economy, and not 
as now in spendthrift vainglory. In the end the effect 
would be the same for civilization as if we shrank to 
the size of Boston." 

" Y^ou will have to explain a little, Howadji," we 
said, " if you expect us to understand your very inter- 
esting position." 

" Why, vou know," he answered, with easy su- 
114 



MEANS OF LIVING IN NEW YORK 

periority, " that now our great influx is of opulent 
strangers who have made a good deal of money, and 
of destitute strangers willing to help them live on it. 
The last we needn't take account of; they are common 
to all cities in all ages ; but the first are as new as any 
phenomenon can be in a world of such tiresome tautol- 
ogies as ours. They come up from our industrial 
provinces, eager to squander their wealth in the com- 
mercial metropolis; they throw down their purses as 
the heroes of old threw down their gantlets for a gage 
of battle, and they challenge the local champions of 
extortion to take them up. It is said that they do not 
want a seasonable or a beautiful thing; they want a 
costly thing. If, for instance, they are offered a house 
or an apartment at a rental of ten or fifteen thousand, 
they will not have it ; they require a rental of fifteen or 
twenty thousand, so that it may be known, ' back home/ 
that they are spending that much for rent in New York, 
and the provincial imagination taxed to proportion the 
cost of their living otherwise to such a sum. You may 
say that it is rather splendid, but you cannot deny that 
it is also stupid." 

" Stupid, no ; but barbaric, yes," we formulated the 
case. " It is splendid, as barbaric pearls and gold are 
splendid." 

" But you must allow that nothing could be more 
mischievous. When next we go with our modest in- 
comes against these landlords, they suppose that we too 
want rentals of fifteen thousand, whereas we would 
easily be satisfied with one of fifteen hundred or a 
thousand. The poor fellows' fancy is crazed by those 
prodigals, and we must all suffer for their madness. 
The extravagance of the new-comers does not affect the 
price of provisions so much, or of clothes; the whole 
population demands food and raiment within the gen- 

115 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

eral means, however much it must exceed its means in 
the cost of shelter. The spendthrifts cannot set the 
pace for such expenditures, no matter how much they 
lavish on their backs and — " 

" Forbear !" we cried. " Turning from the danger 
we have saved you from, you will say, we suppose, that 
New York would be the cheapest of the great cities if it 
were not for the cost of shelter." 

" Something like that," he assented. 

" But as we understand, that difficulty is to be solved 
by co-operative, or composite, housing ?" 

" Something like that," he said again, but there was 
a note of misgiving in his voice. 

" What is the < out ' ?" we asked. 

" There is no ' out/ " he said, with a deep, evasive 
sigh. 



XII 

THE QUALITY OF BOSTON AND THE QUANTITY 
OF NEW YORK 

Later in the summer, or earlier in the fall, than 
when we saw him newly returned from Europe, that 
friend whom the veteran reader will recall as having 
so brashly offered his impressions of the national com- 
plexion and temperament looked in again on the Easy 
Chair. 

" Well," we said, " do you wish to qualify, to hedge, 
to retract ? People usually do after they have been at 
home as long as you." 

" But I do not," he said. He took his former 
seat, but now laid on the heap of rejected MSS., not 
the silken cylinder he had so daintily poised there be- 
fore, but a gray fedora that fell carelessly over in lazy 
curves and hollows. " I wish to modify by adding the 
effect of further observation and adjusting it to my first 
conclusions. Since I saw you I have been back to Bos- 
ton ; in fact, I have just come from there." 

We murmured some banality about not knowing a 
place where one could better come from than Boston. 
But he brushed it by without notice. 

" To begin with, I wish to add that I was quite wrong 
in finding the tvpical Boston face now prevalently 
Celtic." 

" You call that adding ?" we satirized. 
117 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

He ignored the poor sneer. 

" My earlier observation was correct enough, but it 
was a result of that custom which peoples the hills, the 
shores, and the sister continent in summer with the 
New-Englanders of the past, and leaves their capital to 
those New-Englanders of the future dominantly repre- 
sented by the Irish. At the time of my second visit 
the exiles had returned, and there were the faces again 
that, instead of simply forbidding me, arraigned me 
and held me guilty till I had proved myself inno- 
cent." 

" Do you think," we suggested, " that you would 
find this sort of indictment in them if you had a better 
conscience ?" 

" Perhaps not. And I must own I did not find them 
so accusing when I could study them in their contem- 
plation of some more important subject than myself. 
One such occasion for philosophizing them distinctly 
offered itself to my chance witness when an event of the 
last seriousness had called some hundreds of them to- 
gether. One sees strong faces elsewhere; I have seen 
them assembled especially in England ; but I have never 
seen such faces as those Boston faces, so intense, so 
full of a manly dignity, a subdued yet potent per- 
sonality, a consciousness as far as could be from self- 
consciousness. I found something finely visionary in 
it all, as if I were looking on a piece of multiple 
portraiture such as you see in those Dutch paintings of 
companies at Amsterdam, for instance. It expressed 
purity of race, continuity of tradition, fidelity to ideals 
such as no other group of faces would now express. 
You might have had the like ?t Rome, at Athens, at 
Elorence, at Amsterdam, in their prime, possibly in 
the England of the resurgent parliament, though there 
it would have been mixed with a fanaticism absent in 

118 



THE QUALITY OF BOSTON 

Boston. You felt that these men no doubt had their 
limitations, but their limitations were lateral, not 
vertical." 

" Then why/' we asked, not very relevantly, " don't 
you go and live in Boston ?" 

" It wouldn't make me such a Bostonian if I did ; 
I should want a half-dozen generations behind me for 
that. Besides, I feel my shortcomings less in New 
York." 

" You are difficult. Why not fling yourself into the 
tide of joy here, instead of shivering on the brink in 
the blast of that east wind which you do not even find 
regenerative ? Why not forget our inferiority, since 
you cannot forgive it ? Or do you think that by being 
continually reminded of it we can become as those Bos- 
tonians are? Can we reduce ourselves, by repenting, 
from four millions to less than one, and by narrowing 
our phylacteries achieve the unlimited Bostonian ver- 
tically, and go as deup and as high ?" 

u No," our friend said. " Good as they are, we can 
only be better by being different. We have our own 
message to the future, which we must deliver as soon 
as we understand it." 

" Is it in Esperanto ?" 

" It is at least polyglot. But you are taking me too 
seriously. I wished merely to qualify my midsummer 
impressions of a prevailing Celtic Boston by my au- 
tumnal impressions of a persisting Puritanic Boston. 
But it is wonderful how that strongly persistent past 
still characterizes the present in every development. 
Even those Irish faces which I wouldn't have ventured 
a joke with were no doubt sobered by it ; and when the 
Italians shall come forward to replace them it will be 
with no laughing Pulcinello masks, but visages as se- 
vere as those that first challenged the wilderness of 

119 



IMAGINAKY OTEKVIEWS 

Massachusetts Bay, and made the Three Hills tremble 
to their foundations." 

" It seems to us that you are yielding to rhetoric a 
little, aren't you V 9 we suggested. 

" Perhaps I am. But you see what I mean. And 
I should like to explain further that I believe the Cel- 
tic present and the Pelasgic future will rule Boston 
in their turn as the Puritanic past learned so admirably 
to rule it: by the mild might of irony, by the benefi- 
cent power which in the man who sees the joke of 
himself enables him to enter brotherly into the great 
human joke, and be friends with every good and kind 
thing." 

" Could you be a little more explicit ?" 

" I would rather not for the moment. But I should 
like to make you observe that the Boston to be has more 
to hope and less to fear from the newer Americans than 
this metropolis where these are so much more hetero- 
geneous. Here salvation must be of the Jews among 
the swarming natives of the East Side; but in Boston 
there is no reason why the artistic instincts of the 
Celtic and Pelasgic successors of the Puritans should 
not unite in that effect of beauty which is an effect of 
truth, and keep Boston the first of our cities in good 
looks as Avell as good works. With us here in New 
York a civic job has the chance of turning out a city 
joy, but it is a fighting chance. In Boston there is 
little doubt of such a job turning out a joy. The munic- 
ipality of Boston has had almost the felicity of Gold- 
smith — it has touched nothing which it has not adorned. 
Wherever its hand has been laid upon Nature, Nature 
has purred in responsive beauty. They used to talk 
about the made land in Boston, but half Boston is the 
work of man, and it shows what the universe might 
have been if the Bostonians had been taken into the 

120 



THE QUALITY OF BOSTON 

confidence of the Creator at the beginning. The Back 
Bay was only the suggestion of what has since been 
done ; and I never go to Boston without some new cause 
for wonder. There is no other such charming union 
of pleasaunce and residence as the Penways; the sys- 
tem of parks is a garden of delight ; and now the State 
has taken up the work, no doubt at the city's suggestion, 
and, turning from the land to the water, has laid a re- 
straining touch on the tides of the sea, which, ever since 
the moon entered on their management, have flowed 
and ebbed through the channel of the Charles. The 
State has dammed the river; the brine of the ocean no 
longer enters it, but it feeds itself full of sweet water 
from the springs in the deep bosom of the country. 
The Beacon Street houses back upon a steadfast expanse 
as fresh as the constant floods of the Great Lakes." 

" And we dare say that it looks as large as Lake 
Superior to Boston eyes. What do they call their dam ? 
The Charlesea ?" 

" You may be sure they will call it something taste- 
ful and fit," our friend responded, in rejection of our 
feeble mockery. " Charlesea would not be bad. But 
what I wish to make you observe is that all which has 
yet been done for beauty in Boston has been done 
from the unexhausted instinct of it in the cold heart 
of Puritanism, where it ' burns frore and does the ef- 
fect of fire.' As yet the Celtic and Pelasgic agencies 
have had no part in advancing the city. The first have 
been content with voting themselves into office, and the 
last with owning their masters out-of-doors; for the 
Irish are the lords, and the Italians are the landlords. 
But when these two gifted races, with their divinely 
implanted sense of art, shall join forces with the deeply 
conscienced taste of the Puritans, what mayn't we ex- 
pect Boston to be ?" 

9 121 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

" And what mayn't we expect New York to be on 
the same terms, or, say, when the Celtic and Pelasgic 
and Hebraic and Slavic elements join with the old 
Batavians, in whom the love of the artistic is by right 
also native ? Come ! Why shouldn't we have a larger 
Boston here ?" 

" Because we are too large/' our friend retorted, un- 
dauntedly. " When graft subtly crept among the no- 
bler motives which created the park system of Boston 
the city could turn for help to the State and get it; 
but could our city get help from our State ? Our city 
is too big to profit by that help; our State too small 
to render it. The commonwealth of Massachusetts is 
creating a new Garden of Eden on the banks of the 
Charlesea; but what is the State of New York doing 
to emparadise the shores of the Hudson ?" 

" All the better for us, perhaps," we stubbornly, but 
not very sincerely, contended, "if we have to do our 
good works ourselves." 

" Yes, if we do them. But shall they remain un- 
done if we don't do them? The city of N"ew York is 
so great that it swings the State of New York. The 
virtues that are in each do not complement one another, 
as the virtues of Boston and Massachusetts do. Where 
shall you find, in our house or in our grounds, the city 
and the State joining to an effect of beauty? When 
you come to N"ew York, what you see of grandeur is the 
work of commercialism ; what you see of grandeur in 
Boston is the work of civic patriotism. We hire the 
arts to build and decorate the homes of business; the 
Bostonians inspire them to devote beauty and dignity 
to the public pleasure and use. No," our friend con- 
cluded with irritating triumph, " we are too vast, too 
many, for the finest work of the civic spirit. Athens 
could be beautiful- —Florence, Venice, Genoa were — but 

122 



THE QUALITY OF BOSTON 

Kome, which hired or enslaved genius to create beauti- 
ful palaces, temples, columns, statues, could only be 
immense. She could only huddle the lines of Greek 
loveliness into a hideous agglomeration, and lose their 
effect as utterly as if one should multiply Greek noses 
and Greek chins, Greek lips and Greek eyes, Greek 
brows and Greek heads of violet hair, in one monstrous 
visage. No," he exulted, in this mortifying image 
of our future ugliness, " when a city passes a certain 
limit of space and population, she adorns herself in 
vain. London, the most lovable of the mighty mothers 
of men, has not the charm of Paris, which, if one can- 
not quite speak of her virgin allure, has yet a youth 
and grace which lend themselves to the fondness of the 
arts. Boston is fast becoming of the size of Paris, but 
if I have not misread her future she will be careful 
not to pass it, and become as New York is." 

We were so alarmed by this reasoning that we asked 
in considerable dismay : " But what shall we do ? We 
could not help growing: perhaps we wished to over- 
grow ; but is there no such thing as ungrowing ? When 
the fair, when the sex which Ave instinctively attribute 
to cities, finds itself too large in its actuality for a 
Directoire ideal, there are means, there are methods, of 
reduction. Is there no remedy, then, for municipal 
excess of size ? Is there no harmless potion or powder 
by which a city may lose a thousand inhabitants a day, 
as the superabounding fair loses a pound of beauty? 
Is there nothing for New York analogous to rolling on 
the floor, to the straight-front corset, to the sugarless, 
starchless diet ? Come, you must not deny us all hope ! 
How did Boston manage to remain so small ? What 
elixirs, what exercises, did she take or use? Surely 
she did not do it all by reading and thinking !" Our 
friend continued somewhat inexorably silent, and we 

123 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

pursued : " Do you think that by laying waste our 
Long Island suburbs, by burning the whole affiliated 
Jersey shore, by strangling the Bronx, as it were, in 
its cradle, and by confining ourselves rigidly to our 
native isle of Manhattan, we could do something to 
regain our lost opportunity ? We should then have the 
outline of a fish; true, a nondescript fish; but the fish 
was one of the Greek ideals of the female form." He 
was silent still, and we gathered courage to press on. 
" As it is, we are not altogether hideous. We doubt 
whether there are not more beautiful buildings in New 
York now than there are in Boston ; and as for statues, 
where are the like there of our Macmonnies Hale, of 
our Saint-Gaudens Farragut and Sherman, of our Ward 
Indian Hunter ?" 

" The Shaw monument blots them all out," our 
friend relentlessly answered. " But these are merely 
details. Our civic good things are accidental. Bos- 
ton's are intentional. That is the great, the vital dif- 
ference." 

It did not occur to us that he was wrong, he had so 
crushed us under foot. But, with the trodden worm's 
endeavor to turn, we made a last appeal. " And with 
the sky-scraper itself we still expect to do something, 
something stupendously beautiful. Say that we have 
lost our sky-line ! What shall we not have of grandeur, 
of titanic loveliness, when we have got a sky-scraper- 
line?" 

It seemed to us that here was a point which he could 
not meet; and, in fact, he could only say, whether in 
irony or not, " I would rather not think." 

We were silent, and, upon the reflection to which our 
silence invited us, we found that we would rather not 
ourselves think of the image we had invoked. We pre- 
ferred to take up the question at another point. 

124 



THE QUALITY OF BOSTON 

" Well," we said, " in your impressions of Bostonian 
greatness we suppose that you received the effect of 
her continued supremacy in authors as well as author- 
ship, in artists as well as art? You did not meet 
Emerson or Longfellow or Lowell or Prescott or 
Holmes or Hawthorne or Whittier about her streets, 
but surely you met their peers, alive and in the flesh ?" 
" No," our friend admitted, " not at every corner. 
But what I did meet was the effect of those high souls 
having abode there while on the earth. The great 
Boston authors are dead, and the great Boston artists 
are worse — they have come to New York; they have 
not even waited to die. But whether they have died, 
or whether they have come to New York, they have 
left their inspiration in Boston. In one sense the 
place that has known them shall know them no more 
forever; but in another sense it has never ceased to 
know them. I can't say how it is, exactly, but though 
you don't see them in Boston, you feel them. But 
here in New York — our dear, immense, slattern mother 
— who feels anything of the character of her great chil- 
dren? Who remembers in these streets Bryant or Poe 
or Hallock or Curtis or Stoddard or Stedman, or the 
other poets who once dwelt in them ? Who remembers 
even such great editors as Greeley or James Gordon 
Bennett or Godkin or Dana? What malignant magic, 
what black art, is it that reduces us all to one level of 
forgottenness when we are gone, and even before we 
are gone ? Have those high souls left their inspiration 
here, for common men to breathe the breath of finer 
and nobler life from ? I won't abuse the millionaires 
who are now our only great figures; even the million- 
aires are gone when they go. They die, and they leave 
no sign, quite as if they were so many painters and 
poets. You can recall some of their names, but not 

125 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

easily. No, if New York has any hold upon the pres- 
ent from the past, it isn't in the mystical persistence of 
such spirits among us." 

" Well," we retorted, hardily, " we have no need of 
them. It is the high souls of the future which in- 
fluence us." 

Our friend looked at us as if he thought there might 
be something in what we said. " Will you explain ?" 
he asked. 

" Some other time," we consented. 



XIII 
THE WHIRL OF LIFE IN OUR FIRST CIRCLES 

One of those recurrent selves who frequent the 
habitat of the Easy Chair, with every effect of ex- 
terior identities, looked in and said, before he sat down, 
and much before he was asked to sit down, " Are you 
one of those critics of smart or swell society (or what- 
ever it's called now) who despise it because they can't 
get into it, or one of those censors who won't go into 
it because they despise it V 

" Your question," we replied, " seems to be rather 
offensive, but we don't know that it's voluntarily so, 
and it's certainly interesting. On your part, will you 
say what has prompted you, just at the moment, to ac- 
cost us with this inquiry?" Before he could answer, 
we hastened to add : " By-the-way, what a fine, old- 
fashioned, gentlemanly word accost is! People used 
to accost one another a great deal in polite literature. 
' Seeing her embarrassment from his abrupt and vigor- 
ous stare, he thus accosted her.' Or, i Embarrassed 
by his fixed and penetrating regard, she timidly ac- 
costed him.' It seems to us that we remember a great 
many passages like these. Why has the word gone out % 
It was admirrbly fitted for such junctures, and it was 
so polished by use that it slipped from the pen with- 
out any effort of the brain, and — " 

" I have no time for idle discussions of a mere lit- 
127 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

erary nature/' our other self returned. " I am very 
full of the subject which I have sprung upon you, and 
which I see you are trying to shirk." 

" JSTot at all," we smilingly retorted. " We will an- 
swer you according to your folly without the least re- 
luctance. We are not in smart or swell society because 
we cannot get in; but at the same time we would not 
get in if we could, because we despise it too much. 
We wonder," we continued, speculatively, " why we 
always suspect the society satirist of suffering from a 
social snub ? It doesn't in the least follow. Was Pope, 
when he invited his S'in' John to 

' leave all meaner things 
To low ambition and the pride of kings ' 

goaded to magnanimity by a slight from royalty? 
Was Mr. Benson when ho came over here from Lon- 
don excluded from the shining first circles of New 
York and Newport, which are apparently reflected with 
such brilliant fidelity in The Relentless City, and was 
he wreaking an unworthy resentment in portraying our 
richly moneyed, blue-blooded society to the life ? How 
are manners ever to be corrected with a smile if the 
smile is always suspected of being an agonized grin, 
the contortion of the features by the throes of a morti- 
fied spirit? Was George William Curtis in his amus- 
ing but unsparing Potiphar Papers — " 

" Ah, now you are shouting !" our other self ex- 
claimed. 

" Your slang is rather antiquated," we returned, 
with grave severity. " But just what do you mean 
by it in this instance V 9 

" I mean that manners are never corrected with a 

smile, whether of compassion or of derision. The man- 

128 



THE WHIRL OF LIFE 

ners that are bad, that are silly, that are vulgar, that 
are vicious, go on unchastened from generation to gen- 
eration. Even the good manners don't seem to decay: 
simplicity, sincerity, kindness, don't really go out, any 
more than the other things, and fortunately the other 
things are confined only to a small group in every 
civilization, to the black sheep of the great, whity-brown 
or golden-fleeced human family." 

" What has all this vague optimism to do with the 
Potiphar Papers and smart society and George Will- 
iam Curtis ?" we brought the intruder sharply to book. 

"A great deal, especially the part relating to the 
continuity of bad manners. I've just been reading an 
extremely clever little book by a new writer, called 
New York Society on Parade,, which so far as its basal 
facts are concerned might have been written by the 
writer of 6 Our Best Society ' and the other Potiphar 
Papers. The temperament varies from book to book; 
Mr. Ralph Pulitzer has a neater and lighter touch than 
George William Curtis; his book is more compact, 
more directly and distinctly a study, and it is less al- 
loyed with the hopes of society reform which could be 
more reasonably indulged fifty-six years ago. Do you 
remember when ( Our Best Society ' came out in the eld- 
est Putnam's Magazine, that phoenix of monthlies which 
has since twice risen from its ashes? Don't pretend 
that our common memory doesn't run back to the year 
1853 ! We have so many things in common that I 
can't let you disgrace the firm by any such vain as- 
sumption of extreme youth !" 

" Why should we assume it ? The Easy Chair had 
then been three years firmly on its legs, or its rockers, 
and the succession of great spirits, now disembodied, 
whom its ease invited, were all more or less in mature 
flesh. We remember that paper on ' Our Best Society ' 

129 



IMAGINAKY INTEEVIEWS 

vividly, and we recall the shock that its facts concern- 
ing the Upper Ten Thousand of ~New York imparted to 
the innocent, or at least the virtuous, Lower Twenty 
Millions inhabiting the rest of the United States. Do 
you mean to say that the Pour Hundred of this day 
are no better than the Ten Thousand of that? Has 
nothing been gained for quality by that prodigious re- 
duction in quantity ?" 

" On the contrary, the folly, the vanity, the mean- 
ness, the heartlessness, the vulgarity, have only been 
condensed and concentrated, if we are to believe Mr. 
Pulitzer; and I don't see why we should doubt him. 
Did you say you hadn't seen his very shapely little 
study? It takes, with all the unpitying sincerity of a 
kodak, the likeness of our best society in its three most 
characteristic aspects; full-face at dinner, three-quar- 
ters-face at the opera, and profile at a ball, where proud 
beauty hides its face on the shoulder of haughty com- 
mercial or financial youth, and moneyed age dips its 
nose in whatever symbolizes the Gascon wine in the 
paternal library. Mr. Pulitzer makes no attempt at 
dramatizing his persons. There is no ambitious Mrs. 
Potiphar with a longing for fashionable JSTew York 
worlds to conquer, yet with a secret heartache for the 
love of her country girlhood; no good, kind, sordid 
Potiphar bewildered and bedevilled by the surround- 
ings she creates for him; no soft Rev. Cream Cheese, 
tenderly respectful of Mammon while ritually serving 
God; no factitious Ottoman of a Kurz Pasha, laugh- 
ingly yet sadly observant of us playing at the forms 
of European society. Those devices of the satirist be- 
longed to the sentimentalist mood of the Thackerayan 
epoch. But it is astonishing how exactly history re- 
peats itself in the facts of the ball in 1910 from the 
ball of 1852. The motives, the 'personnel, almost the 

130 



THE WHIRL OF LIFE 

materiel, the incidents, are the same. I should think it 
would amuse Mr. Pulitzer, imitating nature from his 
actual observation, to find how essentially his study is 
the same with that of Curtis imitating nature fifty- 
seven years ago. There is more of nature in bulk, not 
in variety, to be imitated now, but as Mr. Pulitzer 
studies it in the glass of fashion, her mean, foolish, 
selfish face is the same. He would find in the sketches 
of the Mid- Victorian satirist all sorts of tender relent- 
ings and generous hopes concerning the 6 gay ' ^"ew 
York of that time which the Early Edwardian satirist 
cannot indulge concerning the gay New York of this 
time. It seems as if we had really gone from bad to 
worse, not qualitatively — we couldn't — but quantita- 
tively. There is more money, there are more men, 
more women, but otherwise our proud world is the 
proud world of 1853." 

" You keep saying the same thing with l damnable 
iterance,' " we remarked. " Don't you suppose that 
outside of New York there is now a vast society, as 
there was then, which enjoys itself sweetly, kindly, 
harmlessly? Is there no gentle Chicago or kind St. 
Louis, no pastoral Pittsburg, no sequestered Cincin- 
nati, no bucolic Boston, no friendly Philadelphia, 
where ' the heart that is humble may look for ' dis- 
interested pleasure in the high-society functions of the 
day or night ? Does New York set the pace for all 
these places, and are dinners given there as here, not 
for the delight of the guests, but as the dire duty of 
the hostesses ? Do the inhabitants of those simple so- 
journs go to the opera to be seen and not to hear ? Do 
they follow on to balls before the piece is done only to 
bear the fardels of ignominy heaped upon them by the 
german's leaders, or to see their elders and fatters get- 
ting all the beautiful and costlv favors while their own 

131 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

young and gracile loveliness is passed slighted by be- 
cause they give no balls where those cruel captains can 
hope to shine in the van? It seems to us that in our 
own far prime — now well-nigh lost in the mists of an- 
tiquity — life was ordered kindlier; that dinners and 
opera-parties and dances were given 

'To bless and never to ban.' " 

" Very likely, on the low society level on which our 
joint life moved/' our other self replied, with his un- 
sparing candor. " You know we were a country vil- 
lage, city-of-the-second-class personality. Even in the 
distant epoch painted in the Potiphar Papers the mo- 
tives of New York society were the same as now. It 
was not the place where birth and rank and fame re- 
laxed or sported, as in Europe, or where ardent in- 
nocence played and feasted as in the incorrupt towns 
of our interior. If Curtis once represented it rightly, 
it was the same ridiculous, hard-worked, greedy, costly, 
stupid thing which Mr. Pulitzer again represents it." 

" And yet," we mused aloud, " this is the sort of 
thing which the ' unthinking multitude ' who criticise, 
or at least review, books are always lamenting that our 
fiction doesn't deal with. Why, in its emptiness and 
heaviness, its smartness and dulness, it would be the 
death of our poor fiction!" 

" Well, I don't know," our counterpart responded. 
" If our fiction took it on the human ground, and as- 
certained its inner pathos, its real lamentableness, it 
might do a very good thing with those clubmen and 
society girls and grandes dames. But that remains to 
be seen. In the mean time it is very much to have 
such a study of society as Mr. Pulitzer has given us. 
For the most part it is £ satire with no pity in it/ but 

132 



THE WHIRL OF LIFE 

there's here and there a touch of compassion, which 
moves the more because of its rarity. When the au- 
thor notes that here and there a pretty dear finds her- 
self left with no one to take her out to supper at the 
ball, his few words wring the heart. ' These poor vic- 
tims of their sex cannot, like the men, form tables of 
their own. All that each can do is to disappear as 
swiftly and as secretly as possible, hurrying home 
in humiliation for the present and despair for the 
future.' " 

" Do such cruel things really happen in our best 
society?" we palpitated, in an anguish of sympathy. 

" Such things and worse," our other self responded, 
" as when in the german the fair debutante sees the 
leader advancing toward her with a splendid and costly 
favor, only to have him veer abruptly off to bestow it 
on some fat elderling who is going to give the next 
ball. But Mr. Pulitzer, though he has these spare in- 
timations of pity, has none of the sentiment which 
there is rather a swash of in the PotipJiar Papers. 
It's the difference between the Mid- Victorian and the 
Early Edwardian point of view. Both satirists are 
disillusioned, but in the page of Curtis there is 

* The tender grace of a day that is dead ' 

and the soft suffusion of hope for better things, while 
in the page of Mr. Pulitzer there is no such quali- 
fication of the disillusion. Both are enamoured of the 
beauty of those daughters of Mammon, and of the 
distinction of our iron-clad youth, the athletic, well- 
groomed, well-tailored worldlings who hurry up-town 
from their banks and brokers' offices and lawyers' of- 
fices to the dinners and opera - boxes and dances of 
fashion. ' The girls and women are of a higher aver- 

133 



IMAGINAEY INTEEVIEWS 

age of beauty than any European ball-room could pro- 
duce. The men, too, are generally well built, tall, and 
handsome, easily distinguishable from the waiters,' Mr. 
Pulitzer assures us." 

" Well, oughtn't that to console ?" we defied our other 
self. " Come ! It's a great thing to be easily distin- 
guishable from the waiters, when the waiters are so 
often disappointed 6 remittance men ' of good English 
family, or the scions of Continental nobility. We 
mustn't ask everything." 

" Eo, and apparently the feeding is less gross than 
it was in Curtis's less sophisticated time. Many of the 
men seem still to smoke and booze throughout the night 
with the host in his 4 library,' but the dancing youth 
don't get drunk as some of them did at Mrs. Potiphar's 
supper, and people don't throw things from their plates 
under the table." 

" Well, why do you say, then, that there is no change 
for the better in our best society, that there is no hope 
for it?" 

" Did I say that \ If I did, I will stick to it. We 
must let our best society be as it now imagines itself. 
I don't suppose that in all that gang of beautiful, 
splendid, wasteful, expensively surfeited people there 
are more than two or three young men of intellectual 
prowess or spiritual distinction, though there must be 
some clever and brilliant toadies of the artist variety. 
In fact, Mr. Pulitzer says as much outright; and it 
is the hard lot of some of the arts to have to tout for 
custom among the vulgar ranks of our best society." 

" Very well, then," we said, with considerable reso- 
lution, " we must change the popular ideal of the best 
society. We must have a four hundred made up of the 
most brilliant artists, authors, doctors, professors, sci- 
entists, musicians, actors, and ministers, with their 

134 



THE WHIRL OF LIFE 

wives, daughters, and sisters, who will walk to one 
another's dinners, or at worst go by trolley, and oc- 
cupy the cheaper seats at the opera, and dance in 
small and early assemblages, and live in seven-room- 
with-bath flats. Money must not count at all in the 
choice of these elect and beautiful natures. The ques- 
tion is, how shall we get the dense, unenlightened 
masses to regard them as the best society; how teach 
the reporters to run after them, and the press to chron- 
icle their entertainments, engagements, marriages, di- 
vorces, voyages to and from Europe, and the other facts 
which now so dazzle the common fancy when it finds 
them recorded in the society intelligence of the news- 
papers V 9 

" Yes, as General Sherman said when he had once 
advocated the restriction of the suffrage and had been 
asked how he was going to get the consent of the ma- 
jority whose votes he meant to take away — ' yes, that is 
the devil of it.' " 

We were silent for a time, and then we suggested, 
" Don't you think that a beginning could be made by 
those real elite we have decided on refusing to let asso- 
ciate with what now calls itself our best society ?" 

" But hasn't our soi - disani best society already 
made that beginning for its betters by excluding 
them?" our other self responded. 

" There is something in what you say," we reluc- 
tantly assented, " but by no means everything. The 
beginning you speak of has been made at the wrong 
end. The true beginning of society reform must be 
made by the moral, aesthetic, and intellectual superiors 
of fashionable society as we now have it. The grandes 
dames must be somehow persuaded that to be really 
swell, really smart, or whatever the last word for the 
thing is, they must search Who's Who in New York 

135 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

for men and women of the most brilliant promise and 
performance and invite them. They must not search 
the banks and brokers' offices and lawyers' offices for 
their dancing-men, but the studios, the editorial-rooms, 
the dramatic agencies, the pulpits, for the most gifted 
young artists, assignment men, interviewers, actors, 
and preachers, and apply to the labor - unions for 
the cleverest and handsomest artisans; they must 
look up the most beautiful and intelligent girl-stu- 
dents of all the arts and sciences, and department 
stores for cultivated and attractive salesladies. Then, 
when all such people have received cards to dinners or 
dances, it will only remain for them to have previous 
engagements, and the true beginning is made. Come! 
You can't say the thing is impossible." 

" Not impossible, no," our complementary self re- 
plied. " But difficult." 



XIV 

THE MAGAZINE MUSE 

Two aging if not aged poets, one much better if not 
much older than the other, were talking of the Muse 
as she was in their day and of the Muse as she is in 
this. At the end, their common mind was that she was 
a far more facile Muse formerly than she is now. In 
other words, as the elder and better poet put it, they 
both decided that many, many pieces of verse are writ- 
ten in these times, and hidden away in the multitude 
of the magazines, which in those times would have 
won general recognition if not reputation for the au- 
thors; they would have been remembered from month 
to month, and their verses copied into the newspapers 
from the two or three periodicals then published, and, 
if they were not enabled to retire upon their incomes, 
they would have been in the enjoyment of a general 
attention beyond anything money can buy at the pres- 
ent day. This conclusion was the handsomer in the 
two poets, because they had nothing to gain and some- 
thing to lose by it if their opinion should ever become 
known. It was in a sort the confession of equality, 
and perhaps even inferiority, which people do not make, 
unless they are obliged to it, in any case. But these 
poets were generous even beyond their unenvious tribe, 
and the younger, with a rashness which his years meas- 
urably excused, set about verifying his conviction in 
a practical way, perhaps the only practical way. 
10 137 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

He asked his publishers to get him all the American 
magazines published; and has the home-keeping reader 
any notion of the vastness of the sea on which this poet 
had embarked in his daring exploration? His pub- 
lishers sent him a list of some eighty -two monthly 
periodicals in all kinds, which, when he had begged 
them to confine it to the literary kind, the aesthetic 
kind only, amounted to some fifty. By far the greater 
number of these, he found, were published in New 
York, but two were from Philadelphia, one from Bos- 
ton, one from Indianapolis, and one even from Chi- 
cago ; two were from the Pacific Slope generally. That 
is to say, in this city there are issued every month about 
forty-five magazines devoted to belles-lettres, of varying 
degrees of excellence, not always connoted by their 
varying prices. Most of them are of the ten-cent va- 
riety, and are worth in most cases ten cents, and in a 
few cases twenty-five or thirty-five cents, quite like 
those which ask such sums for themselves. The cheap- 
est are not offensive to the eye altogether, as they lie 
closed on the dealer's counter, though when you open 
them you find them sometimes printed on paper of the 
wood - pulp, wood - pulpy sort, and very loathly to the 
touch. Others of the cheapest present their literature 
on paper apparently as good as that of the dearest ; and 
as it is not always money which buys literary value, 
especially from the beginners in literature, there seemed 
every reason for the poet to hope that there would be 
as good poetry in the one sort as in the other. In his 
generous animation, he hoped to find some good poetry 
on the wood-pulp paper just as in the Golden Age he 
might have found it carved by amorous shepherds on 
the bark of trees. 

He promised himself a great and noble pleasure from 
his verification of the opinion he shared with that elder 

138 



THE MAGAZINE MUSE 

and better poet, and if his delight must be mixed with 
a certain feeling of reserved superiority, it could hard- 
ly be less a delight for that reason. In turning critic, 
the friendliest critic, he could not meet these dear and 
fair young poets on their own level, but he could at 
least keep from them, and from himself as much as 
possible, the fact that he was looking down on them. 
All the magazines before him were for the month of 
January, and though it was possible that they might 
have shown a certain exhaustion from their extraor- 
dinary efforts in their Christmas numbers, still there 
was a chance of the overflow of riches from those num- 
bers which would trim the balance and give them at 
least the average poetic value. At this point, however, 
it ought to be confessed that the poet, or critic, w r as 
never so willing a reader as writer of occasional verse, 
and it cannot be denied that there was some girding 
up of the loins for him before the grapple with that 
half-hundred of magazines. Though he took them at 
their weakest point, might they not be too much for 
him? 

He fetched a long breath, and opened first that maga- 
zine, clarum et venerabile nomen, from which he might 
reasonably expect the greatest surprises of merit in the 
verse. There were only two pieces, and neither seemed 
to him of the old-time quality, but neither was such 
as he would himself have perhaps rejected if he had 
been editor. Then he plunged at the heap, and in a 
fifteen-cent magazine of recent renown he found among 
five poems a good straight piece of realistic character- 
ization which did much to cheer him. In this, a little 
piece of two stanzas, the author had got at the heart 
of a good deal of America. In another cheap maga- 
zine, professing to be devoted wholly to stories, he 
hoped for a breathing-space, and was tasked by nothing 

139 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

less familiar than Swift's versification of a well-known 
maxim of La Rouchefoncauld. In a ten-cent magazine 
which is too easily the best of that sort, he found two 
pieces of uncommon worth, which opened the way so 
promisingly, indeed, for happier fortunes that he was 
not as much surprised as he might later have been 
in finding five poems, all good, in one of the four 
greater, or at least dearer, magazines. One of these 
pieces was excellent landscape, and another a capital 
nature piece; if a third was somewhat strained, it was 
also rather strong, and a fourth had the quiet which it 
is hard to know from repose. Two poems in another 
of the high-priced magazines were noticeable, one for 
sound poetic thinking, and the other as very truthfully 
pathetic. The two in a cheap magazine, by two Ken- 
tucky poets, a song and a landscape, were one genuine- 
ly a song, and the other a charming communion with 
nature. In a pair of periodicals devoted to outdoor 
life, on the tamer or wilder scale, there were three 
poems, one celebrating the delights of a winter camp, 
which he found simple, true in feeling, and informal 
in phrasing; another full of the joy of a country ride, 
very songy, very blithe, and original; and a third a 
study of scenery which it realized to the mind's eye, 
with some straining in the wording, but much felicity 
in the imagining. A Mid- Western magazine had an 
excellent piece by a poet of noted name, who failed to 
observe that his poem ended a stanza sooner than he 
did. In a periodical devoted to short stories, or aban- 
doned to them, there were two good pieces, one of them 
delicately yet distinctly reproducing certain poetic as- 
pects of New York, and giving the sense of a fresh 
talent. Where the critic would hardly have looked for 
them, in a magazine of professed fashion and avowed 
smartness, he came upon three pieces, one sweet and 

140 



THE MAGAZINE MUSE 

fine, one wise and good, one fresh and well turned. A 
newer periodical, rather going in for literary quality, 
had one fine piece, with a pretty surprise in it, and 
another touched with imaginative observation. 

The researches of the critic carried him far into the 
night, or at least hours beyond his bedtime, and in the 
dreamy mood in which he finally pursued them he was 
more interested in certain psychological conditions of 
his own than in many of the verses. Together with a 
mounting aversion to the work, he noted a growing 
strength for it. He could dispatch a dozen poems in 
almost as many minutes, and not slight them, either; 
but he no longer jumped to his work. He was aware 
of trying to cheat himself in it, of pretending that the 
brief space between titles in the table of contents, which 
naturally implied a poem, sometimes really indicated a 
short bit of prose. He would run his eye hastily over 
an index, and seek to miss rather than find the word 
" poem " repeated after a title, and when this ruse suc- 
ceeded he would go back to the poem he had skipped 
with the utmost unwillingness. If his behavior was 
sinful, he was duly punished for it, in the case of a 
magazine which he took up well toward midnight, re- 
joicing to come upon no visible sign of poetry in it. 
But his glance fell to a grouping of titles in a small- 
print paragraph at the bottom of the page, and he per- 
ceived, on close inspection, that these were all poems, 
and that there were eighteen of them. 

He calculated, roughly, that he had read from eighty- 
five to a hundred poems before he finished; after a 
while he ceased to take accurate count as he went on, 
but a subsequent review of the magazines showed that 
his guess was reasonably correct. From this review 
it appeared that the greater number of the magazines 
published two poems in each month, while several pub- 

141 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

lished but one, and several five or seven or four. An- 
other remarkable fact was that the one or two in the 
more self-denying were as bad as the whole five or 
seven or nine or eighteen of those which had more 
freely indulged themselves in verse. Yet another sin- 
gular feature of the inquiry was that one woman had a 
poem in iive or six of the magazines, and, stranger yet, 
always a good poem, so that no editor would have been 
justified in refusing it. There was a pretty frequent 
recurrence of names in the title-pages, and mostly these 
names were a warrant of quality, but not always of 
the author's best quality. The authorship was rather 
equally divided between the sexes, and the poets were 
both young and old, or as old as poets ever can be. 

When the explorer had returned from the search, 
which covered apparently a great stretch of time, but 
really of space, he took his notes and went with them 
to that elder friend of his whose generous enthusiasm 
had prompted his inquiry. Together they looked them 
over and discussed the points evolved. " Then what 
is your conclusion?" the elder of the two demanded. 
" Do you still think I was right, or have you come to a 
different opinion ?" 

" Oh, how should I safely confess that I am of a 
different opinion? You would easily forgive me, but 
what would all those hundred poets whom I thought 
not so promising as you believed do to my next book? 
Especially what would the poetesses ?" 

" There is something in that. But you need not 
be explicit. If you differ with me, you can generalize. 
What, on the whole, was the impression you got ? Had 
none of the pieces what we call distinction, for want 
of a better word or a clearer idea ?" 

" I understand. No, I should say, not one ; though 
here and there one nearlv had it — so nearly that I held 

" 142 



THE MAGAZINE MUSE 

my breath from not being quite sure. But, on the 
other hand, I should say that there was a good deal of 
excellence, if you know what that means." 

" I can imagine," the elder poet said. " It is another 
subterfuge. What do you really intend ?" 

" Why, that the level was pretty high. Xever so 
high as the sky, but sometimes as high as the sky- 
scraper. There was an occasional tallness, the effect, 
I think, of straining to be higher than the thought or 
the feeling warranted. And some of the things had a 
great deal of naturalness." 

" Come ! That isn't so bad." 

" But naturalness can be carried to a point where it 
becomes affectation. This happened in some cases 
where I thought I was going to have some pleasure of 
the simplicity, but found at last that the simplicity 
was a pose. Sometimes there was a great air of being 
untrammelled. But there is such a thing as being in- 
formal, and there is such a thing as being unmannerly." 

"Yes?" 

" I think that in the endeavor to escape from con- 
vention our poets have lost the wish for elegance, which 
was a prime charm of the Golden Age. Technically, 
as well as emotionally, they let themselves loose too 
much, and the people of the Golden Age never let 
themselves loose. There is too much Xature in them, 
which is to say, not enough ; for, after all, in her little 
aesthetic attempts, Xature is very modest." 

The elder poet brought the younger sharply to book. 
" Xow you are wandering. Explain again." 

" Why, when you and I were young — you were al- 
ways and always will be young—" 

" Xone of that !" 

" It seemed to me that we wished to be as careful 
of the form as the most formal of our poetic forebears, 

143 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

and that we would not let the smallest irregularity 
escape us in our study to make the form perfect. We 
cut out the tall word; we restrained the straining; 
we tried to keep the wording within the bounds of the 
dictionary ; we wished for beauty in our work so much 
that our very roughness was the effect of hammering; 
the grain we left was where we had used the file to 
produce it." 

" Was it ? And you say that with these new fellows 
it isn't so ?" 

" Well, what do you say to such a word as ' danken- 
ing,' which occurred in a very good landscape V 9 

" One such word in a hundred poems V 9 

" One such word in a million would have been too 
many. It made me feel that they would all have liked 
to say ' dankening/ or something of the sort. And in 
the new poets, on other occasions, I have found faulty 
syntax, bad rhymes, limping feet. The editors are to 
blame for that, when it happens. The editor who 
printed ' dankening ' was more to blame than the poet 
who wrote it, and loved the other ugly word above all 
his other vocables." The elder poet was silent, and the 
other took fresh courage. " Yes, I say it ! You were 
wrong in your praise of the present magazine verse at 
the cost of that in our day. When we were commencing 
poets, the young or younger reputations were those of 
Stedman, of Bayard Taylor, of the Stoddards, of Al- 
drich, of Celia Thaxter, of Rose Terry, of Harriet 
Prescott, of Bret Harte, of Charles Warren Stoddard, 
of the Piatts, of Eitz James O'Brien, of Fitzhugh 
Ludlow, of a dozen more, whom the best of the newest 
moderns cannot rival. These were all delicate and 
devoted and indefatigable artists and lovers of form. 
It cannot do the later generation any good to equal 
them with ours." 

144 



THE MAGAZINE MUSE 

" There is something in what you say." The elder 
poet was silent for a time. Then he asked, " Out of 
the hundred poems you read in your fifty magazines, 
how many did you say were what you would call 
good?" 

His junior counted up, and reported, " About twenty- 
four." 

" Well, don't you call that pretty fair, in a hun- 
dred ? I do. Eeflect that these were all the magazines 
of one month, and it is probable that there will be as 
many good poems in the magazines of every month in 
the year. That will give us two hundred and eighty- 
eight good poems during 1907. Before the first decade 
of the new century is ended, we shall have had eleven 
hundred and fifty-two good magazine poems. Do you 
suppose that as many good magazine poems were writ- 
ten during the last four years of the first decade of 
the eighteenth century ? Can vou name as many your- 
self?" 

" Certainly not Nobody remembers the magazine 
poems of that time, and nobody will remember the 
poems of the four years ending the present decade." 

" Do you mean to say that not one of them is worth 
remembering ?" 

The younger poet paused a moment. Then he said, 
with the air of a cross-examined witness, " Under ad- 
vice of counsel, I decline to answer." 



XV 

COMPARATIVE LUXURIES OF TRAVEL 

On a night well toward its noon, many years ago, a 
friend of the Easy Chair (so close as to be at the same 
time its worst enemy) was walking wearily up and 
down in the station at Portland, Maine, and wonder- 
ing if the time for his train to start would ever come, 
and, if the time did come, whether his train would 
really take advantage of that opportunity to leave Port- 
land. It was, of course, a night train, and of course 
he had engaged a lower berth in the sleeping-car; there 
are certain things that come by nature with the com- 
fortable classes to which the friend of the Easy Chair 
belonged. He would no more have thought of travel- 
ling in one of the empty day coaches side-tracked in 
the station than he would have thought of going by 
stage, as he could remember doing in his boyhood. He 
stopped beside the cars and considered their potential 
passengers with amaze and compassion; he laughed at 
the notion of his being himself one of them ; and, when 
he turned his back on them, he was arrested by the 
sight of an elderly pair looking from the vantage of the 
platform into the interior of a lighted Pullman parlor- 
car which, for reasons of its own, was waiting in lumi- 
nous detachment apart from the day coaches. There 
was something engaging in the gentle humility of the 
elderly pair who peered into the long, brilliant saloon 

146 



LUXURIES OF TRAVEL 

with an effect not so much of ignorance as of inex- 
perience. They were apparently not so rustic as they 
were what another friend of the Easy Chair calls vil- 
laginous; and they seemed not of the commonest unin- 
formed villaginosity, but of general intelligence such 
as comes of reading and thinking of many modern 
things which one has never seen. As the eavesdropper 
presently made out from a colloquy unrestrained by 
consciousness of him, they had never seen a parlor-car 
before, except perhaps as it flashed by their meek little 
home depot with the rest of some express train that 
never stopped there. 

" It is splendid, John," the woman said, holding by 
the man's arm while she leaned forward to the window 
which she tiptoed to reach with her eager eyes. 

" I guess it's all of that," the man consented, sadly. 

" I presume we sha'n't ever go in one," she suggested. 

" "Not likely," he owned, in the same discouraged 
tone. 

They were both silent for a time. Then the woman 
said, with a deep, hopeless aspiration, " Dear ! I wish 
I could see inside one, once !" 

The man said nothing, and if he shared her bold 
ambition he made no sign. 

The eavesdropper faltered near their kind backs, 
wishing for something more from them which should 
give their souls away, but they remained silently stand- 
ing there, and he did not somehow feel authorized 
to make them reflect that, if the car was lighted up, 
it must be open, and that the friendly porter some- 
where within would not mind letting them look 
through it under his eye. Perhaps they did reflect, 
and the woman was trying to embolden the man to the 
hardy venture. In the end they did not attempt it, 
but they turned away with another sigh from the 

147 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

woman which found its echo in the eavesdropper's 
heart. Doubtless if they had penetrated that splendid 
interior without having paid for seats, it would, in some 
fine, mystical sort, have pauperized them; it would 
have corrupted them; they would have wished after 
that always to travel in such cars, when clearly they 
could not afford it; very possibly it might have led to 
their moral if not financial ruin. So he tried to still 
his bosom's ache, but he could never quite forget that 
gentle pair with their unrequited longing, and the other 
day they came almost the first thing into his mind 
when he read that a great German steamship company 
had some thoughts of putting on a train of Pullman 
cars from the port of arrival to the mercantile me- 
tropolis which was the real end of their ships' voyages. 
lie thought, whimsically, perversely, how little differ- 
ence it would make to that pair, how little to those 
measureless most whose journeys shall end in heaven, 
where Pullman passengers, or even passengers by the 
ordinary European first-class cars, may be only too glad 
to meet them. Pie gave a looser rein to his thoughts 
and considered how very little the ordinary necessities 
of life, such as Pullman cars and taxicabs and electric 
radiators and non-storage chickens and unsalted butter 
concern the great mass of the saints, who would find 
them the rarest luxuries, and could hardly be imagined 
coveting them; and then from this wild revery he fell 
to asking himself whether a Pullman train would be 
such a great advance or advantage over the old-fash- 
ioned European first-class carriages in which he had 
been so long content to travel with the native nobility. 
Self -brought to book on this point, he had to own that 
he had once had moments of thinking in a German 
second-class car that he would not change to an Amer- 
ican Pullman if he could for even less than a third 

148 



LUXUK1ES OF TEAVEL 

more money. He recalled a pleasant run from Crewe 
to Edinburgh in a third-class English car, when he never 
once thought of a Pullman car except to think it was 
no better. To be sure, this was after two-thirds of his 
third-class fellow-passengers had got out, and he was 
left to the sole enjoyment of two-thirds of the seats. 
It is the luxury of space which your more money buys 
you in England, where no one much lower than a duke 
or a prime minister now goes first class for a long 
haul. Eor short hauls it is different, and on the Con- 
tinent it is altogether different. There you are often 
uncomfortably crowded in the first-class carriages, and 
doubtless would be in a Pullman if there were any, so 
that if you are wise, or only well informed, you will 
give the guard a shilling to telegraph before leaving 
London and get you a number on the Papide from 
Calais to Paris. 

It is astonishing how quickly knowledge of any such 
advisable precaution spreads among even such arrogant- 
ly stupid people as first-class passengers ordinarily are. 
By the time a certain train had started for Dover with 
that friend of the Easy Chair's already mentioned, 
every soul in his first - class compartment had tele- 
graphed ahead, and when they arrived in Calais the 
earliest Englishman who got past the customs ran 
ahead and filled the racks of the carriage with his 
hand-baggage, so that the latest Frenchman was obliged 
to jump up and down and scream, and perhaps swear 
in his strange tongue, before he could find room for 
his valise, and then calm down and show himself the 
sweetest and civilest of men, and especially the obedient 
humble servant of the Englishman who had now made 
a merit of making way for his bag. 

At this point the fable teaches that money will not 
buy everything in European travel, though some Amer- 

149 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

icans imagine it will. It will not, for instance, buy 
comfort or decency, though it will secure privacy in a 
French sleeper between Paris and Marseilles either 
way. For an augmentation of forty-five francs, or nine 
dollars, on the price of a first-class ticket, it will buy 
you a berth in a small pen which you must share with 
another animal, and be tossed hither and yon, night 
long, as in the berth of a Bermuda steamer. Second- 
class passengers in France or Italy cannot buy a berth 
in a sleeper for any money, and they may go hang or 
stand, for all the International Sleeping-Car Company 
cares; and this suggests the question whether in our 
own free and equal land the passengers in the ordinary 
day coaches are ever invited, by the first call or the 
last, to share the hospitalities of our dining-cars ; or are 
these restricted to the proud stomachs of the Pullman 
passengers ? 

]STo, no; the privacy of a French sleeping-car is all 
very well, but for decency give our friend a good, old- 
fashioned Pullman sleeper at a third the money, with 
its curtains swaying with the motion of the car and 
muting the long-drawn, loud-drawn breathing of the 
serried sleepers behind them. To be sure, in the morn- 
ing, when stooping backs begin to round the curtains 
out, and half-shod feet to thrust into the narrow gang- 
way between them, the effect is of a familiarity, an 
intimacy; but so much trust, so much brotherly kind- 
ness goes with it all that you could not call it inde- 
cency, though certainly you could not claim it privacy. 
It only proves, as that friend of ours was saying, that 
money cannot buy everything, and that, if you expect 
the Pullman parlor-cars to be an improvement on the 
German first-class cars, you will be disappointed, prob- 
ably. First-class cars vary much all over Europe ; even 
second-class cars do. In Austria they are not nearly 

150 



LUXUKIES OF TKAVEL 

so good as in Germany, and in Italy — poor, dear Italy ! 
— they are worse still. That is because, the enemies 
of socialism say, the roads are state roads, or because, 
the friends of socialism say, the expropriated com- 
panies have dumped their worn-out rolling-stock on 
the commonwealth, which must bear the shame of it 
with the stranger. Between these clashing claims we 
will not put our blade. All we say is that Italian rail- 
road travel is as bad as heart could wish — the heart 
that loves Italy and holds dear the memory of the days 
when there were few railroads, if any, there, and one 
still went by diligence or vetiura. The only absolutely 
good railroad travel is in England, where the corridor 
car imagined from the Pullman has realized the most 
exacting ideal of the traveller of any class. In the 
matter of dining-cars we have stood still (having at- 
tained perfection at a bound), while the English diner 
has shot ahead in simplicity and quality of refection. 
With us a dollar buys more dinner than you wish or 
like; with them three shillings pay for an elegant suf- 
ficiency, and a tip of sixpence purchases an explicit 
gratitude from the waiter which a quarter is often 
helpless to win from his dark antitype with us. The 
lunch served on the steamer train from London to 
Liverpool leaves the swollen, mistimed dinner on the 
Boston express — 

" But what about that 5 p.m. breakfast which you 
got, no longer ago than last September, on the express 
between Salisbury and Exeter?" our friend exults to 
ask ; and we condescend to answer with forced candor.: 

" Yes, that was rather droll. !No Englishman would 
dream of ordering afternoon tea consisting of chops, 
boiled potatoes, and a pot of souchong, and, if we chose 
to do so, we took a serious chance. But starvation will 
drive one to anything ; we had had nothing to eat since 

151 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

leaving Salisbury three hours before, and in the Eng- 
lish air this is truly famine. Besides, the amiable 
agent who came to our compartment for our order 
pledged his word that those potatoes should be ready 
in twenty minutes; and so they were, and so were the 
chops, and so, of course, was the tea. What he had 
failed to specify was that the dining-car had been left, 
by divers defections at the junctions passed, the last 
car in our train, and that it was now straining at its 
leash in wild leaps and bounds. One reached it by 
passing through more corridor cars than there are Pull- 
mans and day coaches in a west-bound Lake Shore 
train, and when one arrived one reeled and flounced 
into one's seat by such athletics as one uses in a Ber- 
muda steamer (or did use in the old fifteen-hundred- 
ton kind) crossing the Gulf Stream. When once com- 
paratively secure in one's chair, the combat with the 
lunch began. Mrs. Siddons would have been at home 
there, for there w as nothing for it but to stab the pota- 
toes, and all one's cunning of fence was needed to hold 
one's own with the chops. But how delicious they 
were! How the first mealed and the last melted in 
the mouth; and the tea, when once poured from the 
dizzy height at which the pot had to be held, and the 
wild whirl in which the cup had to be caught to the 
lips, how it cheered without inebriating, and how the 
spirit rose to meet it ! The waiter, dancing and sway- 
ing like any ship's steward, served the stray Americans 
with as much respectful gravity as if they had been 
county-family English and he had been for generations 
in their service. He did not deprecate the capers of the 
car, but only casually owned that, when it happened to 
be the last in the train, it did pitch about a bit, sir. 

No, England is the only country where you can get 
the whole worth of your money in railroad travel, and 

152 



LUXURIES OF TRAVEL 

the well-to-do sinner can enjoy the comfort which must 
he his advance recompense in this world for the hap- 
piness he cannot warrantahly count upon in the next. 
That steamer train of Pullmans in Germany will never 
contest the palm with the English corridor train; nor 
will our palatial, porterless depots vie with the sim- 
plest of these English wayside stations, where the soft 
endearments of the railway servants penetrate to the 
very interior of the arriving stranger's compartment 
and relieve him of all anxiety for his hand-baggage. 
Then the cloak-room, that refuge of temporary sojourn, 
where his baggage remains in the porter's charge till 
it is put back into the train, who will contend that 
our parcels' windows, with their high counters fencing 
the depositor from the grim youths standing like re- 
ceiving and paying tellers within, compare with the 
English cloak-room ? Its very name descends from the 
balls and assemblies of the past, and graces the public 
enjoyment of its convenience with something of the 
courtesy and dignity of the exclusive pleasures of the 
upper classes; it brings to one sense a vision of white 
shoulders bent over trim maids slippering slim feet, and 
to another the faint, proud odors of flowers that with- 
ered a hundred years ago. 

But what vain concession is this to the outworn ideals 
of a state and a condition justly superseded! How 
far we have got from that gentle pair with whom we 
began peering into the parlor-car in Portland, Maine! 
To such as they it will matter little whether Pullman 
cars are or are not put on that steamer train in North 
Germany. A great danger is that the vast horde of 
Americans who travel will forget the immeasurable 
majority who remain at home, and will lose in 
their sophistication the heaven - glimpsing American 
point of view. It is very precious, that point of 
11 153 



IMAGINAKY INTEKVIEWS 

view, and the foreigner who wins it is a happier man 
than the native who purse-proudly puts it away. When 
we part with the daily habit of trolleys and begin to 
think in cabs and taxicabs; when we pass the line of 
honest day coaches and buy a seat in the parlor-car; 
when we turn from pie, or baked beans, and coffee at 
the refreshment-counter and keep our hunger for the 
table d'hote of the dining-car; when we buy a room 
in the steamboat in disdain of the berth that comes 
with our ticket; when we refuse to be one of four or 
even two in the cabin of the simpler steamers and will 
not go abroad on any vessel of less than twenty or 
thirty thousand tons, with small, separate tables and 
tuxedos in the saloon; when we forsake the clothing- 
store with its democratic misfit for all figures and order 
our suits in London, then we begin to barter away our 
birthright of republican simplicity, and there is soon 
nothing for us but a coronet by marriage in the family 
or a quarter - section of public land in northwestern 
Canada. 

There has been altogether too much talk (some of 
it, we contritely own, has been ours) of the compara- 
tive comforts and discomforts of life for the better-to- 
do in Europe and America. In the demand for Pull- 
man trains between our port of arrival and the end of 
our journey when we go to the Continent for a much- 
needed rest, we are apt to forget the fellow - citizens 
whom we saw across the impassable barrier dividing 
our first class from them on the steamer, and who will 
find the second-class German cars quite good enough 
for them, and better than our day coaches at home. 
If we cannot remember these, then let us remember 
those for whom Pullmans are not good enough and 
who spurn the dust of our summer ways in their auto- 
mobiles, and leave the parlor-cars to our lower-class 

154 



LUXURIES OF TRAVEL 

vulgarity. Such people take their automobiles to Eu- 
rope with them, and would not use that possible Pull- 
man train if they found it waiting for them at the 
port of arrival in Germany. What is the use % It will 
soon not be an affair of automobiles, but of aeroplanes, 
at the ports of European arrival, and a Pullman train 
will look sadly strange and old to the debarking pas- 
sengers. No one will want to take it, as no one would 
now want to take a bicycle, or even a " bicycle built for 
two." These things are all comparative; there is noth- 
ing positive, nothing ultimate in the luxuries, the splen- 
dors of life. Soon the last word in them takes on a 
vulgarity of accent; and Distinction turns from them 
" with sick and scornful looks averse," and listens for 
the 

"airy tongues that syllable men's names 
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses." 

Simplicity, at the furthest possible remove from all 
complexity, will be the next word — the word that fol- 
lows the last, the woman's word. 



XVI 

QUALITIES WITHOUT DEFECTS 

They had got to that point in their walk and talk 
where the talk might be best carried forward by ar- 
resting the walk ; and they sat down on a bench of the 
Eamble in Central Park, and provisionally watched a 
man feeding a squirrel with peanuts. The squirrel 
had climbed up the leg of the man's trousers and over 
the promontory above, and the man was holding very 
still, flattered by the squirrel's confidence, and anxious 
not to frighten it away by any untoward movement ; 
if the squirrel had been a child bestowing its first in- 
telligent favors upon him the man could not have been 
prouder. He was an old fellow, one of many who 
pamper the corrupt rodents of the Park, and reduce 
them from their native independence to something 
like the condition of those pauper wards of the na- 
tion on our Indian Eeservations, to whom a blurred 
image of the chase offers itself at stated intervals 
in the slaughter of the Government's dole of beef- 
cattle. 

The friend to whom this imperfect parallel occurred 
recalled his thoughts from it and said, with single refer- 
ence to the man and the squirrel : " I suppose that's an 
expression of the sort of thing we've been talking about. 
Kindness to animals is an impulse, isn't it, of the 6 nat- 

156 



QUALITIES WITHOUT DEFECTS 

ural piety ' embracing the fatherhood of God and the 
brotherhool of man ?" 

" I don't think it's quite so modern as that for- 
mulation/' the other friend questioned. " I was 
thinking it was very eighteenth - century ; part of 
the universal humanitarian movement of the time 
when the master began to ask himself whether the 
slave was not also a man and a brother, and the 
philanthropist visited the frightful prisons of the 
day and remembered those in bonds as bound with 
them." 

" Yes, you may say that," the first allowed. " But 
benevolence toward dumb creatures originated very 
much further back than the eighteenth century. There 
was St. Francis of Assisi, you know, who preached to 
the birds, didn't he ? and Walter von der Vogelweide, 
who pensioned them. And several animals — cats, croco- 
diles, cows, and the like — enjoyed a good deal of con- 
sideration among the Egyptians. The serpent used to 
have a pretty good time as a popular religion. And 
what about the Stoics? They were rather kind to 
animals, weren't they? Why should Pliny's Doves 
have come down to us in mosaic if he cultivated them 
solely for the sake of broiled squabs ? It's true that the 
modern Eoman, before the extension of the S. P. C. A. 
to his city, used his horse cruelly upon the perfectly 
unquestionable ground that the poor beast was not a 
Christian." 

" I don't remember about the Stoics exactly," the 
second friend mused aloud; and the first let this go, 
though they both understood that very likely he not 
only did not remember, but had never known. " They 
had so many virtues that they must have been kind to 
brutes, but I taste something more Cowperian, more 
Wordsworthian, than Marcus - Aurelian in our own 

157 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

kindness. These poets taught me, so far as I could 
learn, not to 

- enter on my list of friends the man 
Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm/ 

and 

' Never to mix my pleasure or my pride 
With sorrow of the meanest thing that breathes.' " 

" Yes, but I don't like giving up the Stoics ; we may 
have to come back to their ground if things keep on 
going the way they have gone for the last generation. 
The Stoics had a high ideal of duty; it's hard to see 
that the Christian ideal is higher, though they taught 
themselves to be proudly good, and we (if we may still 
say we when we say Christians) are always trying to 
teach ourselves to be humbly good." 

". What do you mean," the second of the friends de- 
manded, " by coming back to their ground ?" 

" Why," the first responded, picking up a twig that 
opportunely dropped at his feet, and getting out his 
knife to whittle it, " I suppose they were the first ag- 
nostics, and we who don't so much deny the Deity as 
ignore Him — " 

" I see," the second answered, sadly. " But aren't 
you throwing up the sponge for faith rather pre- 
maturely? The power of believing has a tremendous 
vitality. I heard a Catholic once say to a Protestant 
friend, ( You know the Church has outlived schisms 
much older than yours.' x\nd inside of Protestantism 
as well as Catholicism there is a tremendous power 
of revival. We have seen it often. After an age 
of unbelief an age of belief is rather certain to 
follow." 

" Well, well, I'm willing. I'm no more agnostic 

158 



QUALITIES WITHOUT DEFECTS 

than you are. I should be glad of au age of faith for 
the rest to my soul, if for no other reason. I was hark- 
ing back to the Stoics not only because they were good 
to animals, if they were good, but because they seemed 
to have the same barren devotion to duty which has 
survived my faith as well as my creed. But why, if 
I neither expect happiness nor dread misery, should I 
still care to do my duty ? And I certainly always do." 

" What, always V 9 

" Well, nearly always." 

The friends laughed together, and the first said, 
" What a pity the Gilbertian humor has gone out so ; 
you can't adapt it to a daily need any longer without 
the risk of not being followed." 

The other sighed. " Nearly everything goes out, ex- 
cept duty. If that went out, I don't think I should 
have much pleasure in life." 

" No, you would be dead, without the hope of resur- 
rection. If there is anything comes direct from the 
Creative Force, from 

1 La somma sapienza e il primo amore,' 

it is the sense of duty, i the moral law within us,' which 
Kant divined as unmistakably delivered from God to 
man. I use the old terminology." 

" Don't apologize. It still serves our turn ; I don't 
know that anything else serves it yet. And you make 

me think of what dear old M. D. C told me shortly 

after his wife died. He had wished, when they both 
owned that the end was near, to suggest some comfort 
in the hope of another life, to clutch at that straw to 
save his drowning soul ; but she stopped him. She said, 
' There is nothing but duty, the duty we have wished to 
do and tried to do.' " 

159 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

The friends were silent in the pathos of the fact, 
and then the first said, " I suppose we all wish to do our 
duty, even when we don't try or don't try hard 
enough." 

The other conjectured, " Perhaps, after all, it's a 
question of strength; wickedness is weakness." 

" That formula won't always serve ; still, it will 
serve in a good many cases ; possibly most. It won't do 
to preach it, though." 

" No, we must cultivate strength of character. I 
wonder how ?" 

" Well, your Stoics—" 

" My Stoics ?" 

" Anybody's Stoics — did it by self - denial. When 
they saw a pleasure coming their way they sidestepped 
it; they went round the corner, and let it go by while 
they recruited their energies. Then when they saw a 
duty coming they stepped out and did it." 

" It seems very simple. But aren't you rather 
cynical ?" 

" That's what peojde call one when one puts ethics 
picturesquely. But perhaps I've rather overdone it 
about the Stoics. Perhaps they wouldn't have refused 
to enjoy a pleasure at their own expense, at their cost 
in some sort of suffering to themselves. They really 
seem to have invented the Christian ideal of duty." 

" And a very good thing. It may be all that will be 
left of Christianity in the end, if the Christian hope 
of reward goes as the Christian fear of punishment 
has gone. It seems to have been all there was of it in 
the beginning." 

The second of the friends said at this, " I don't know 
that I should go so far as that." 

The first returned, " Well, I don't know that I 
should ask vou. I don't know that I go that far 

160 



QUALITIES WITHOUT DEFECTS 

myself," he said, and then they laughed together 
again. 

The man who was feeding the squirrel seemed to 
have exhausted his stock of peanuts, and he went away. 
After some hesitation the squirrel came toward the two 
friends and examined their countenances with a beady, 
greedy eye. He was really glutted with peanuts, and 
had buried the last where he would forget it, after hav- 
ing packed it down in the ground with his paws. 

" !No, no," the first of the friends said to the squirrel ; 
" we are on the way back to being Stoics and practising 
the more self-denying virtues. You won't get any pea- 
nuts out of us. For one thing, we haven't got any." 

" There's a boy," the second friend dreamily sug- 
gested, " down by the boat-house with a basketful." 

" But I am teaching this animal self-denial. He 
will be a nobler squirrel all the rest of his life for not 
having the peanuts he couldn't get. That's like what 
I always try to feel in my own case. It's what I call 
character-building. Get along!" 

The squirrel, to which the last words were addressed, 
considered a moment. Then it got along, after having 
inspected the whittlings at the feet of the friends to 
decide whether they were edible. 

" I thought," the second of the friends said, " that 
your humanity included kindness to animals." 

" I am acting for this animal's best good. I don't 
say but that, if the peanut-boy had come by with his 
basket, I shouldn't have yielded to my natural weakness 
and given the little brute a paper of them to bury. He 
seems to have been rather a saving squirrel — when he 
was gorged." 

The mellow sunlight of the November day came 
down through the tattered foliage, and threw the 
shadows of the friends on the path where they sat, 

161 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

with their soft hats pulled over their foreheads. They 
were silent so long that when the second of them resumed 
their conversation he had to ask, " Where were we ?" 

" Cultivating force of character in squirrels." 

" I thought we had got by that." 

" Then we had come round to ourselves again." 

" Something like that," the first friend reluctantly 
allowed. 

" What a vicious circle ! It seems to me that our 
first duty, if that's what you mean, is to get rid of 
ourselves." 

" Whom should we have left ? Other people % We 
mustn't pamper their egotism in chastising our own. 
We must use a great deal of caution in doing our duty. 
If I really loved that squirrel, if I were truly kind to 
animals, if I studied their best good, as disagreeable 
friends say they study ours, I should go after him and 
give him a hickory-nut that would wear down his teeth 
as nature intended; civilization is undermining the 
health of squirrels by feeding them peanuts, which 
allow their teeth to overgrow." 

" That is true. Isn't it doing something of the same 
sort in other ways for all of us ? If I hadn't lost my 
teeth so long ago, I'm sure I should feel them piercing 
from one jaw to another in their inordinate develop- 
ment. It's duty that keeps down the overgrowths that 
luxury incites. By-the-way, what set you thinking so 
severely about duty this beautiful Sunday morning? 
The neglected duty of going to church ?" 

" Ah, I call going to church a pleasure. No, I sup- 
pose it was an effect, a reverberation, of the tumult of 
my struggle to vote for the right man on Tuesday, when 
I knew that I was throwing my vote away if I did vote 
for him." 

" But you voted for him ?" 

162 



QUALITIES WITHOUT DEFECTS 

The first friend nodded. 

" Which, man was it ?" 

" What's the use ? He was beaten — 

' That is all you know or need to know.' " 

" Of course he was beaten if it was your duty to 
vote for him," the second friend mused. " How patient 
the Creator must be with the result of His counsel to 
His creatures ! He keeps on communing, commanding, 
if we are to believe Kant. It is His one certain way 
to affirm and corroborate Himself. Without His per- 
petual message to the human conscience, He does not 
recognizably exist; and yet more than half the time 
His mandate sends us to certain defeat, to certain death. 
It's enough to make one go in for the other side. Of 
course, we have to suppose that the same voice which 
intimates duty to us intimates duty to them ?" 

" And that they would like to obey it, if they could 
consistently with other interests and obligations ?" 

" Yes, they juggle with their sense of it ; they pre- 
tend that the Voice does not mean exactly what it says. 
They get out of it that way." 

" And the great, vital difference between ourselves 
and them is that we promptly and explicitly obey it; 
we don'j, palter with it in the slightest ; i we don't 
bandy words with our sovereign,' as Doctor Johnson 
said. I wonder," the speaker added, with the briskness 
of one to whom a vivid thought suddenly occurs, " how 
it would work if one went and did exactly the contrary 
of what was intimated to the human conscience ?" 

" That's not a new idea. There are people who 
habitually do so, or, rather, to whom an inverted moral 
law is delivered." 

" You mean the people who beat you at the polls 
last Tuesday ?" 

163 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

" No, I mean the people in the asylums, some of 
them. They are said to hear the voice that bids us do 
right commanding them to do wrong. 6 Thou shalt 
kill,' they hear it say, ' thou shalt steal, thou shalt 
bear false witness, thou shalt commit adultery, thou 
shalt not honor thy father and thy mother/ and so on 
through the Decalogue, with the inhibition thrown off 
or put on, as the case may be." 

" How very hideous !" the second friend exclaimed. 
" It's like an emanation from the Pit. I mean the Pit 
that used to be. It's been abolished." 

" And a very good thing. The noises from it went 
far to drown the voice of God, and bewildered some 
men so that they did not rightly know what the voice 
was saying. Now when people hear a voice bidding 
them do evil, we know what to do with them." 

" And you think that the fellows who outvoted you 
on Tuesday heard the same voice that you heard; and 
they disobeyed it ?" 

" Ah, it's hard to say. We haven't got to the bottom 
of such things yet. Perhaps they disobeyed the voice 
provisionally, expecting to make a satisfactory explana- 
tion later on. Or perhaps they had put their civic 
consciences in the keeping of others, who gave them 
an official interpretation of the command, with in- 
structions not to take it literally." 

" That's very interesting," the second friend said. 
" Then it's your idea that no one really prefers to do 
wrong ?" 

" Not outside of the asylums. And even there they 
can plead authority. No, no, no! In a world pretty 
full of evil there isn't any purely voluntary evil among 
the sane. When the ( wicked,' as we call them, do 
wrong, it is provisionally only; they mean to do right 

presently and make it up with the heavenly powers. 

164 



QUALITIES WITHOUT DEFECTS 

As long as an evil-doer lives he means to cease some 
time to do evil. He may put it off too long, or until 
he becomes ethically unsound. You know Swedenborg 
found that the last state of sinners was insanity." 

" Dreadful!" 

" But I've always thought very few reached that 
state. There's this curious thing about it all: we are 
not only ethically prompted by that inner voice, we are 
aesthetically prompted ; it's a matter of taste as well as 
of conduct, too. The virtues are so clean, the vices so 
repulsively dirty. Justice is beautifully symmetrical; 
injustice is so shapeless, so unbalanced. Truth is such 
a pure line; falsehood is so out of drawing. The 
iniquities make you uncomfortable. The arts deny 
them." 

The second friend drew a long breath. " Then I 
don't see why there are so many." 

" Well," the first friend suggested, " there seems 
to be a difficulty. Some say that they have to be em- 
ployed as antitheses; we can't get on without them, at 
least at this stage of the proceedings. Perhaps we shall 
advance so far that we shall be able to use historical 
or accomplished evil for the contrasts by which we shall 
know actual good." 

" I don't see how you make that out." 

" Why, there are already some regions of the globe 
where the summer does not require the antithesis of 
winter for its consciousness. Perhaps in the moral 
world there will yet be a condition in which right shall 
not need to contrast itself with wrong. We are still 
meteorologically very imperfect." 

" And how do you expect to bring the condition 
about? By our always doing our duty?" 

" Well, we sha'n't by not doing it." 



XVII 

A WASTED OPPORTUNITY 

The Easy Chair saw at once that its friend was 
full of improving conversation, and it let him begin 
without the least attempt to stay him ; anything of the 
kind, in fact, would have been a provocation to greater 
circumstance in him. He said: 

" It was Christmas Eve, and I don't know whether 
he arrived by chance or design at a time when the heart 
is supposed to be softest and the mind openest. It's 
a time when, unless you look out, you will believe any- 
thing people tell you and do anything they ask you. 
I must say I was prepossessed by his appearance; he 
was fair and slender, and he looked about thirty-five 
years old ; and when he said at once that he would not 
deceive me, but would confess that he was just out of 
the penitentiary of a neighboring State where he had 
been serving a two years' sentence, I could have taken 
him in my arms. Even if he had not pretended that 
he had the same surname as myself, I should have 
known him for a brother, and though I suspected that 
he was wrong in supposing that his surname was at all 
like mine, I was glad that he had sent it in, and so 
piqued my curiosity that I had him shown up, instead 
of having my pampered menial spurn him from my 
door, as I might if he had said his name was Brown, 
Jones, or Robinson." 

166 



A WASTED OPPOETUNITY 

" We dare say you have your self -justification," we 
put in at this point, " but you must own that it doesn't 
appear in what you are saying. As a good citizen, with 
the true interests of the poor at heart, you would cer- 
tainly have had your pampered menial spurn him from 
your door. His being of your name, or claiming to be 
so, had nothing to do with his merit or want of it." 

" Oh, I acknowledge that, and I'll own that there 
was something in his case, as he stated it, that appealed 
to my fancy even more than his community of surname 
appealed to my family affection. He said he was a 
Scotchman, which I am not, and that he had got a job 
on a cattle-steamer, to work his way back to his native 
port. The steamer would sail on Monday, and it was 
now Friday night, and the question which he hesitated, 
which he intimated, in terms so tacit that I should not 
call them an expression of it, was how he was to live 
till Monday. 

" He left the calculation entirely to me, which he 
might not have done if he had known what a poor 
head I had for figures, and I entered into it with a 
reluctance which he politely ignored. I had some quite 
new two-dollar notes in my pocket-book, the crisp sort, 
which rustle in fiction when people take them out to 
succor the unfortunate or bribe the dishonest, and 
I thought I would give him one if I could make it go 
round for him till his steamer sailed. I was rather 
sorry for its being fresh, but I had no old, shabby, or 
dirty notes such as one gives to cases of dire need, you 
know." 

* No, we don't know. We so seldom give paper at 
all ; we prefer to give copper." 

" Well, that is right ; one ought to give copper if the 
need is very pressing; if not so pressing, one gives 
small silver, and so on up. But here was an instance 

107 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

which involved a more extended application of alms. 
' You know/ I told him, while I was doing my sum in 
mental arithmetic, i there are the Mills hotels, where 
you can get a bed for twenty-five cents; I don't re- 
member whether they throw in breakfast or not.' I 
felt a certain squalor in my attitude, which was not 
relieved by the air of gentle patience with Avhich he 
listened, my poor namesake, if not kinsman; we were 
both at least sons of Adam. He looked not only gentle, 
but refined; I made my reflection that this was prob- 
ably the effect of being shut up for two years where the 
winds were not allowed to visit him roughly, and the 
reflection strengthened me to say, ' I think two dollars 
will tide you over till Monday.' I can't say whether 
he thought so, too, but he did not say he did not think 
so. He left it quite to me, and I found another mathe- 
matical difficulty. There were three nights' lodging 
to be paid for, and then he would have a dollar and a 
quarter for food. I often spend as much as that on a 
single lunch, including a quarter to the waiter, and I 
wouldn't have liked making it pay for three days' 
board. But I didn't say so ; I left the question entirely 
to him, and he said nothing. 

" In fact, he was engaged in searching himself for 
credentials, first in one pocket, and then in another; 
but he found nothing better than a pawn-ticket, which 
he offered me. i What's this V I asked. ' My overcoat,' 
he said, and I noted that he had borrowed a dollar and 
a half on it. I did not like that ; it seemed to me that 
he was taking unfair advantage of me, and I said, ' Oh, 
I think you can get along without your overcoat.' I'm 
glad to think now that it hadn't begun to snow yet, and 
that I had no prescience of the blizzard — what the pa- 
pers fondly called the Baby Blizzard (such a pretty 

fancy of theirs!) — which was to begin the next after- 

168 



A WASTED OPPORTUNITY 

noon, wasn't making the faintest threat from the moon- 
lit sky then. He said, ' It's rather cold/ but I ignored 
his position. At the same time, I gave him a quarter." 

" That was magnificent, but it was not political 
economy," we commented. " You should have held 
to your irrefutable argument that he could get along 
without his overcoat. You should have told him that 
he would not need it on shipboard." 

" Well, do you know," our friend said, " I really 
did tell him something like that, and it didn't seem to 
convince him, though it made me ashamed. I suppose 
I was thinking how he could keep close to the reading- 
room fire, and I did not trouble to realize that he would 
not be asked to draw up his chair when he came in from 
looking after the cattle." 

" It would have been an idle compliment, anyway," 
we said. " You can't draw up the reading-room chairs 
on shipboard ; they're riveted down." 

" I remembered afterward. But still I was deter- 
mined not to take his overcoat out of pawn, and he 
must have seen it in my eye. He put back his pawn- 
ticket, and did not try to produce any other credentials. 
I had noticed that the ticket did not bear the surname 
we enjoyed in common ; I said to myself that the name 
of Smith, which it did bear, must be the euphemism 
of many who didn't wish to identify themselves with 
their poverty even to a pawnbroker. But I said to him, 
' Here !' and I pulled open my table drawer, and took 
from it a small envelope full of English coins, which 
I had been left stranded with on several returns from 
Europe; the inhuman stewards had failed to relieve 
me of them; and as I always vow, when I have got 
through our customs, that I will never go to Europe 
again, I had often wondered what I should do with 
those coins. I now took out the largest and handsomest 
12 169 



IMAGINAKY INTEEVIEWS 

of them : ' Do you know what that is V ' Yes/ he 
said ; ' it's two shillings and sixpence — what we call a 
half-crown.' His promptness restored my faith in him ; 
I saw that he must be what he said; undoubtedly he 
had been in the penitentiary ; very likely our name was 
the same; an emotion of kinship stirred in my heart. 
i Here !' I said, and I handed him the coin ; it did not 
seem so bad as giving him more American money. 
' They can change that on the ship for you. I guess 
you can manage now till Monday/ and my confidence 
in Providence diffused such a genial warmth through 
my steam-heated apartment that I forgot all about his 
overcoat. I wish I could forget about it now." 

We felt that we ought to say something to comfort 
a man who owned his excess of beneficence. " Oh, you 
mustn't mind giving him so much money. We can't 
always remember our duty to cut the unfortunate as 
close as we ought. Another time you will do better. 
Come ! Cheer up !" 

Our friend did not seem entirely consoled by our 
amiability. In fact, he seemed not to notice it. He 
heaved a great sigh in resuming : " He appeared to 
think I was hinting that it was time for him to go, 
for he got up from the lounge where I had thought- 
lessly had the decency to make him sit down, and went 
out into the hall, thanking me as I followed him to the 
door. I was sorry to let him go ; he had interested me 
somehow beyond anything particularly appealing in his 
personality; in fact, his personality was rather null 
than otherwise, as far as that asserted any claim; such 
a mere man and brother! Before he put his hand on 
my door-knob a belated curiosity stirred in me, which 
I tried, as delicately as I could, to appease. c Was your 
trouble something about the ' — I was going to say the 
ladies, but that seemed too mawkish, and I boldly 

170 



A WASTED OPPOKTUNITY 

outed with- — i women V ' Oh no,' he said, meekly ; ' it 
was just cloth, a piece of cloth.' ' Breaking and enter- 
ing V I led on. ' Well, not exactly, but — it came to 
grand larceny,' and I might have fancied a touch of 
mounting self-respect in his confession of a consider- 
able offence. 

" I didn't know exactly what to say, so I let myself 
off with a little philosophy: 'Well, you see, it didn't 
pay, exactly.' ' Oh no,' he said, sadly enough, and he 
went out." 

Our friend was silent at this point, and we felt that 
we ought to improve the occasion in his behalf. " Well, 
there you lost a great opportunity. You ought to have 
rubbed it in. You ought to have made him reflect upon 
the utter folly of his crime. You ought to have made 
him realize that for a ridiculous value of forty, or fifty, 
or seventy-five dollars, he had risked the loss of his 
liberty for two years, and not only his liberty, but his 
labor, for he had come out of the penitentiary after 
two years of hard work as destitute as he went in; he 
had not even the piece of cloth to show for it all. Yes, 
you lost a great opportunity." 

Our friend rose from the dejected posture in which 
he had been sitting, and blazed out — we have no milder 
word for it — blazed out in a sort of fiery torrent which 
made us recoil : " Yes, I lost that great opportunity, 
and I lost a greater still. I lost the opportunity of 
telling that miserable man that, thief for thief, and 
robber for robber, the State which had imprisoned him 
for two years, and then cast him out again without a 
cent of pay for the wages he had been earning all that 
dreadful time, was a worse thief and a worse robber 
than he! I ought to have told him that in so far as 
he had been cheated of his wages by the law he was 
the victim, the martvr of an atrocious survival of bar- 

171 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

barism. Oh, I have thought of it since with shame and 
sorrow ! I was sending him out into the cold that was 
gathering for the Baby Blizzard without the hope of 
his overcoat, but since then I have comforted myself 
by considering how small my crime was compared with 
that of the State which had thrown him destitute upon 
the world after the two years' labor it had stolen from 
him. At the lowest rate of wages for unskilled labor, 
it owed him at least a thousand dollars, or, with half 
subtracted for board and lodging, five hundred. It 
was his delinquent debtor in that sum, and it had 
let him loose to prey upon society in my person be- 
cause it had defrauded him of the money he had 
earned." 

" But, our dear friend !" we entreated, " don't you 
realize that this theft, this robbery, this fraud, as you 
call it, was part of the sanative punishment which the 
State had inflicted upon him ?" 

" And you don't think two years' prison, two years' 
slavery, was sanative enough without the denial of his 
just compensation ?" 

We perceived that it would be useless to argue with 
a man in this truculent mood, and we silently forbore 
to urge that the vision of destitution which the crim- 
inal must have before his eyes, advancing hand in hand 
with liberty to meet him at the end of his term when 
his prison gates opened into the world which would 
not feed, or shelter, or clothe, or in any wise employ 
him, would be a powerful deterrent from future crime, 
and act as one of the most efficient agencies of virtue 
which the ingenuity of the law has ever invented. But 
our silence did not wholly avail us, for our poor mis- 
guided friend went on to say: 

" Suppose he had a wife and children — he may have 

had several of both, for all I know — dependent on him, 

172 



A WASTED OPPOKTUNITY 

would it have been particularly sanative for them to be 
deprived of his earnings, too?" 

" We cannot answer these sophistries/' we were ex- 
asperated into replying. " All that we can say is that 
anything else — anything like what you call justice to 
the criminal, the prisoner — would disrupt society," and 
we felt that disrupt was a word which must carry con- 
viction to the densest understanding. It really ap- 
peared to do so in this case, for our friend went away 
without more words, leaving behind him a manuscript, 
which we mentally rejected, while seeing our way to 
use the material in it for the present essay; it is the 
well-known custom of editors to employ in this way the 
ideas of rejected contributors. 

A few days later we met our friend, and as we 
strolled beside him in the maniacal hubbub of the New 
York streets, so favorable to philosophic communion, 
we said, " Well, have you met your namesake since 
you came to his rescue against the robber State, or did 
he really sail on the cattle-steamer, as he said he was 
going to do ?" 

Our friend gave a vague, embarrassed laugh. " He 
didn't sail, exactly, at least not on that particular 
steamer. The fact is, I have just parted from him 
at my own door — the outside of it. It appears that 
the authorities of that particular line wished to take 
advantage of him by requiring him to pay down a sum 
of money as a guarantee of good faith, and that he re- 
fused to do so — not having the money, for one reason. 
I did not understand the situation exactly, but this 
was not essential to his purpose, which made itself 
evident through a good deal of irrelevant discourse. 
Since I had seen him, society had emulated the State 
in the practice of a truly sanative attitude toward him. 
At the place where he went to have his half - crown 

173 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

changed into American money they would only give 
him forty cents for it, but he was afterward assured 
by an acquaintance that the current rate was sixty 
cents. In fact, a half-crown is worth a little more." 

" Well, what can you expect of money-changers ?" 
we returned, consolingly. " And what is going to be- 
come of your unhappy beneficiary now ?" 

" Why, according to his report, fortune has smiled, 
or half-smiled, as the novelists say, upon him. He has 
found a berth on another line of cattle-steamers, where 
they don't require a deposit as a guarantee of good 
faith. In fact, the head steward has taken a liking 
to him, and he is going out as one of the table-stewards 
instead of one of the herdsmen ; I'm not sure that herds- 
men is what they call them." 

We laughed sardonically. " And do you believe he 
is really going?" 

Our friend sighed heavily. " Well, I don't believe 
he's coming back. I only gave him the loose change 
I had in my pocket, and I don't think it will support 
him so handsomely to the end of the week that he will 
wish to call upon me for more." 

We were both silent, just as the characters are in a 
novel till the author can think what to make them say 
next. Then we asked, " And you still think he had 
been in the penitentiary V 9 

" I don't see why he should have said so if he wasn't." 

" Well, then," we retorted bitterly, again like a 
character in fiction, " you have lost another great op- 
portunity: not a moral opportunity this time, but an 
aesthetic opportunity. You could have got him to tell 
you all about his life in prison, and perhaps his whole 
career leading up to it, and you could have made some- 
thing interesting of it. You might have written a pica- 
resque novel or a picaresque short story, anyway." 

174 



A WASTED OPPORTUNITY 

Our friend alloyed, with a mortified air, " It was 
rather a break" 

" You threw away the chance of a lifetime. Name- 
sakes who have been in jail don't turn up every day. 
In his intimate relation to you, he would have opened 
up, he would have poured out his whole heart to you. 
Think of the material you have lost." 

We thought of it ourselves, and with mounting ex- 
asperation. When we reflected that he would probably 
have put it into his paper, and when we reflected that 
we could have given so much more color to our essay, 
we could not endure it. " Well, good-day," we said, 
coldly ; " we are going down this way." 

Our friend shook hands, lingeringly, absently. Then 
he came to himself with a mocking laugh. " Well, 
perhaps he wasn't, after all, what he said." 



XVIII 

A NIECE'S LITERARY ADVICE TO HER UNCLE 

A Veteran Novelist, who was also an intimate 
friend of the Easy Chair's, sat before his desk pensively 
supporting his cheek in his left hand while his right 
toyed with the pen from which, for the moment at 
least, fiction refused to flow. His great -niece, who 
seemed such a contradiction in terms, being as little and 
vivid personally as she was nominally large and stately, 
opened the door and advanced upon him. 

" Do I disturb you, uncle V 9 she asked ; she did not 
call him great-uncle, because that, she rightly said, was 
ridiculous; and now, as part of the informality, she 
went on without waiting for him to answer, "Because, 
you know, you wanted me to tell you what I thought 
of your last story ; and I've just read it." 

" Oh yes V 9 the Veteran Novelist assented brightly, 
hiding his struggle to recall which storv it was. 
" Well ?" 

" Well," she said, firmly but kindly, " you want me 
to be frank with you, don't you V 9 

" By all means, my dear. It's very good of you to 

read my story." By this time, he had, with the help 

of the rather lean volume into which his publishers 

had expanded a long-short story, and which she now 

held intensely clasped to her breast, really remembered. 

"Not at all!" she said. She sat down very elas- 

170 



A NIECE'S LITERARY ADVICE 

tically in the chair on the other side of his desk, and 
as she talked she accented each of her emotions by a 
spring from the cushioned seat. " In the first place/' 
she said, with the effect of coming directly to business, 
" I suppose you know yourself that it couldn't be called 
virile." 

" No ?" he returned. " What is virile ?" 

" Well, I can't explain, precisely ; but it's some- 
thing that all the critics say of a book that is very 
strong, don't you know ; and masterful ; and relentless ; 
and makes you feel as if somebody had taken you 
by the throat; and shakes you up awfully; and 
seems to throw you into the air, and trample you under 
foot." 

" Good heavens, my dear !" the Veteran Novelist ex- 
claimed. " I hope I'm a gentleman, even when I'm 
writing a novel." 

" Your being a gentleman has nothing to do with 
it, uncle!" she said, severely, for she thought she per- 
ceived a disposition in the Veteran Novelist to shuffle. 
" You can't be virile and at the same time remember 
that you are a gentleman. Lots of luomen write virile 
books." 

" Ladies ?" the novelist asked. 

" Don't I say that has nothing to do with it ? If 
you wish to grip the reader's attention you must let 
yourself go, whether you're a gentleman or a lady. Of 
course," she relented, " your book's very idyllic, and 
delightful, and all that; but," she resumed, severely, 
" do you think an honest critic could say there was not 
a dull page in it from cover to cover?" 

The novelist sighed. " I'm sure I don't know. They 
seem to say it — in the passages quoted in the advertise- 
ments — of all the books published. Except mine," he 
added, sadly. 

177 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

" Well, we will pass that point," his great-niece re- 
lented again. " I didn't intend to wound your feelings, 
uncle." 

" Oh, you haven't. I suppose I am a little too easy- 
going at times." 

" Yes, that is it. One can't say dull ; but too easy- 
going. No faithful critic could begin a notice of your 
book with such a passage as : * Have you read it ? No ? 
Then hop, skip, and jump, and get it. Don't wait to 
find your hat or drink your coffee. March ! It's going 
like the wind, and you must kite if you want one of 
the first edition of fifty thousand!' Now that," his 
great-niece ended, fondly, " is what I should like every 
critic to say of your book, uncle." 

The Veteran Novelist reflected for a moment. Then 
he said, more spiritedly, " I don't believe I should, my 
dear." 

" Then you must; that's all. But that's a small 
thing. What I really wonder at is that, with all your 
experience, you are not more of a stylist." 

"Stylist?" 

" Yes. I don't believe there's an epigram ir. your 
book from beginning to end. That's the reason the 
critics don't quote any brilliant sentences from it, and 
the publishers can't advertise it properly. It makes 
me mad to find the girls repeating other authors' say- 
ings, and I never catch a word from a book of yours, 
though you've been writing more than a century." 

" Not quite so long, my dear, I think ; though very, 
very long. But just what do you mean by style ?" 

" Well, you ought to say even the simplest things in 
a distinguished way; and here, all through, I find you 
saying the most distinguished things in the simplest 
way. But I won't worry you about things that are 

not vital. I'll allow, for the sake of argument, that 

178 



A NIECE'S LITERARY ADVICE 

you can't have virility if you remember that you are 
a gentleman even when you are writing fiction. But 
you can have passion. Why don't you ?" 

" Don't I? I thought— " 

" Not a speck of it — not a single speck ! It's rather 
a delicate point, and I don't exactly know how to put 
it, but, if you want me to be frank, I must." She looked 
at her great-uncle, and he nodded encouragement. " I 
don't believe there's a single place where he crushes her 
to his heart, or presses his lips to hers in a long kiss. 
He kisses her cheek once, but I don't call that anything. 
Why, in lots of the books, nowadays, the girls them- 
selves cling to the men in a close embrace, or put their 
mouths tenderly to theirs — Well, of course, it sounds 
rather disgusting, but in your own earlier books, I'm 
sure there's more of it — of passion. Isn't there ? 
Think!" 

The Veteran Novelist tried to think. " To tell you 
the truth, my dear, I can't remember. I hope there 
was, and there always will be, love, and true love, in 
my novels — the kind that sometimes ends in happy 
marriage, but is always rather shy of showing itself off 
to the reader in caresses of any kind. I think passion 
can be intimated, and is better so than brutally stated. 
If you have a lot of hugging and kissing — " 

"Uncle!" 

" — How are your lovers different from those poor 
things in the Park that make you ashamed as you pass 
them?" 

" The police ought to put a stop to it. They are 
perfectly disgraceful !" 

" And they ought to put a stop to it in the novels. 

It's not only indecent, but it's highly insanitary. Nice 

people don't want you to kiss their children, nowadays, 

and yet they expect us novelists to supply them with 

179 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

passion of the most demonstrative sort in our fiction. 
Among the Japanese, who are now one of the great 
world-powers, kissing is quite unknown in real life. I 
don't know the Japanese fiction very well, but I doubt 
whether there's a single kiss, or double, in it. I believe 
that a novel full of intense passion could be written 
without the help of one embrace from beginning to end." 

" Uncle !" the girl vividly exclaimed, " why don't 
you do it? It would be the greatest success! Just 
give them the wink, somehow, at the start — just hint 
that there was the greatest kind of passion going on 
all the time and never once showing itself, and the 
girls would be raving about it. Why don't you do it, 
uncle ? You know I do so want you, for once, to write 
the most popular book of the month !" 

" I want to do it myself, my dear. But as to my 
writing a book full of suppressed passion, that's a story 
in itself." 

"Tell it!" she entreated. 

" The Easy Chair wouldn't give me room for it. 
But I'll tell you something else. When I was a boy 
I had a knack at versing, which came rather in an- 
ticipation of the subjects to use it on. I exhausted 
Spring and Morning and Snow and Memory, and the 
whole range of mythological topics, and then I had 
my knack lying id]e. I observed that there was one 
subject that the other poets found inexhaustible, but 
somehow I felt myself disqualified for treating it. 
How could I sing of Love when I had never been in 
love? For I didn't count those youthful affairs when 
I was only in the Third Reader and the first part of the 
Arithmetic. I went about trying to be in love, as a 
matter of business; but I couldn't manage it. Sud- 
denly it managed itself; and then I found myself 
worse disqualified than ever. I didn't want to mention 

180 



A NIECE'S LITERARY ADVICE 

it ; either to myself or to her, much less to the world at 
large. It seemed a little too personal." 

" Oh, uncle ! How funny you are !" 

" Do you think so ? I didn't think it much fun then, 
and I don't now. Once I didn't know what love was, 
and now I've forgotten!" 

" No such thing, uncle ! You write ahout it beauti- 
fully, even if you're not very virile or epigrammatic 
or passionate. I won't let you say so." 

" Well, then, my dear, if I haven't forgotten, I'm 
not interested. You see, I know so much more about it 
than my lovers do. I can't take their point of view any 
longer. To tell you the truth, I don't care a rap 
whether they get married or not. In that story there, 
that you've been reading, I got awfully tired of the 
girl. She was such a fool, and the fellow was a perfect 
donkey." 

" But he was the dearest donkey in the world ! I 
wanted to h — shake hands with him, and I wanted to 
kiss — yes, kiss ! — Tier, she was such a lovable fool." 

" You're very kind to say so, my dear, but you can't 
keep on making delightful idiots go down with the pub- 
lic. That was what I was thinking when you came in 
and found me looking so dismal. I had stopped in the 
middle of a most exciting scene because I had dis- 
covered that I was poking fun at my lovers." 

" And here I," the girl lamented, " didn't take the 
slightest notice, but began on you with the harshest 
criticisms !" 

" I didn't mind. I dare say it was for my good." 

" I'm sure I meant it so, uncle. And what are you 
going to do about it ?" 

" Well, I must get a new point of view." 

"Yes?" 

" I must change my ground altogether. I can't pre- 

181 



IMAGINAKY INTEEVIEWS 

tend any longer to be the contemporary of my lovers, 
or to have the least sympathy with their hopes and 
fears. If I were to be perfectly honest with them, I 
should tell them, perhaps, that disappointed love was 
the best thing that could happen to either of them, but, 
if they insisted on happiness, that a good broken en- 
gagement promised more of it than anything else I 
could think of." 

" That is true," the girl sighed. " There are a great 
many unhappy marriages. Of course, people would 
say it was rather pessimistic, wouldn't they ?" 

" People will say anything. One mustn't mind them. 
But now I'll tell you what I've been thinking all the 
time we've been talking." 

" Well ? I knew you were not thinking of my non- 
sense !" 

" It was very good nonsense, as nonsense goes, my 
dear. What I've been thinking is that I must still have 
the love interest in my books, and have it the main in- 
terest, but I must treat it from the vantage-ground of 
age ; it must be something I look back upon, and a little 
down upon." 

"I see what you mean," the girl dissentingly as- 
sented. 

" I must be in the whole secret — the secret, not 
merely of my lovers' love, but the secret of love itself. 
I must know, and I must subtly intimate, that it doesn't 
really matter to anybody how their affair turns out; 
for in a few years, twenty or thirty years, it's a thou- 
sand to one that they won't care anything about it 
themselves. I must maintain the attitude of the sage, 
dealing not unkindly but truthfully with the situation." 

" It would be rather sad," the girl murmured. " But 
one likes sad things." 

" When one is young, one does ; when one is old, one 
182 



A NIECE'S LITERAKY ADVICE 

likes true things. But, of course, my love-stories would 
be only for those who have outlived love. I ought to 
be fair with my readers, and forewarn them that my 
story was not for the young, the hopeful, the happy." 

The girl jumped to her feet and stood magnificent. 
"Uncle! It's grand!" 

He rose, too. " What is f * he faltered. 

" The idea ! Don't you see ? You can have the pub- 
lisher announce it as a story for the disillusioned, the 
wretched, and the despairing, and that would make 
every girl want it, for that's what every girl thinks she 
is, and they would talk to the men about it, and then 
they would want it, and it would be the book of the 
month ! Don't say another word. Oh, you dear !" In 
spite of the insanitary nature of the action, she caught 
her uncle round the neck, and kissed him on his bald 
spot, and ran out of the room. She opened the door to 
call back: "Don't lose a single minute. Begin it 
now /" 

But the Veteran Novelist sank again into his chair in 
the posture in which she had surprised him. 



XIX 

A SEARCH FOR CELEBRITY 

We lately received a publication which has inter- 
ested us somewhat out of proportion to its size. It 
is called The Way into Print, but it does not treat, 
as the reader might rashly suppose, of the best method 
of getting your name into the newspapers, either as a 
lady who is giving a dinner to thirteen otherwise un- 
known persons, or is making a coming-out tea for her 
debutante daughter, or had a box full of expensively 
confectioned friends at the opera or the vaudeville, or 
is going to read a paper at a woman's club, or is in 
any sort figuring in the thousand and one modern 
phases of publicity; it does not even advise her guests 
or hearers how to appear among those present, or those 
who were invited and did not come, or those who would 
not have come if they had been invited. Its scope is 
far more restricted, yet its plane is infinitely higher, 
its reach incomparably further. The Print which it 
proposes to lead the Way into is that print where the 
elect, who were once few and are now many, are mak- 
ing the corridors of time resound to their footsteps, as 
poets, essayists, humorists, or other literary forms of 
immortality. Their procession, which from the point 
of the impartial spectator has been looking more and 
more like a cake-walk in these later years, is so in- 
creasingly the attraction of young-eyed ambition that 

184 



A SEARCH FOE CELEBRITY 

nothing interests a very large class of people more than 
advice for the means of joining it, and it is this advice 
which the publication in point supplies: supplies, we 
must say, with as much good sense and good feeling 
as is consistent with an office which does not seem so 
dignified as we could wish. 

Inevitably the adviser must now and then stoop to 
the folly of the aspirant, inevitably he must use that 
folly from time to time with wholesome severity, but 
he does not feel himself equal to the work unaided. 
Our sudden national expansion, through the irresistible 
force of our imaginative work, into an intellectual 
world-power has thrust a responsibility upon the vet- 
erans of a simpler time which they may not shirk, and 
the author of The Way into Print calls upon them 
to share his task. He is not satisfied with the inter- 
esting chapters contributed by younger authors who are 
in the act of winning their spurs, but he appeals to 
those established in the public recognition to do their 
part in aiding us to hold our conquest through the in- 
struction and discipline of those who must take their 
places when they put their armor off. He does this 
by means of a letter, almost an open letter, addressed 
personally to each veteran by means of the substitution 
of his typewritten name for that of some other veteran, 
but not differenced in the terms of the ensuing appeal 
to his kindness or his conscience. He puts himself 
upon a broad humanitarian ground, and asks that the 
typewritten author, who, he assumes, is " prominently 
before the public," shall answer certain questions to 
which the appellant owns that he has already received 
hundreds of replies. 

By an odd mischance one of his half-open letters 
found its way to the Easy Chair, and, although that 
judgment-seat felt relieved from the sense of anything 

13 185 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

like a lonely prominence before the public by the very 
multitude of those similarly consulted, it did not re- 
main as Easy as it would have liked under the erring 
attribution of prominence. Yet to have refused to help 
in so good a work would not have been in its nature, 
and it lost as little time as possible in summoning a 
real author of prominence to consider the problems so 
baffling to a mere editorial effigy; for, as we ought to 
explain, the de facto editor is to be found in the Study 
next door, and never in the Easy Chair. The author 
prominently before the public came at once, for that 
kind of author has very little to do, and is only too 
happy to respond to calls like that of the friend of 
rising authorship. Most of his time is spent at sym- 
posiums, imagined by the Sunday editions of the news- 
papers, to consider, decide the question whether fig- 
paste is truly a health-food; or whether, in view of a 
recent colossal gift for educational purposes, the prod- 
uct of the Standard Oil Company was the midnight oil 
which Shakespeare had in mind when he spoke of the 
scholar wasting it; or something of that kind. His 
mind is whetted to the sharpest edge by its employment 
with these problems, and is in prime condition for such 
simple practical inquiries as those proposed by the let- 
ter we had received. But, of course, he put on an air 
of great hurry, and spoke of the different poems, novels, 
essays, and sketches which he had laid aside to oblige 
us, and begged us to get down to business at once. 

" We wish nothing better than to do so," we said, to 
humor him, " for we know you are a very busy man, 
and we will not keep you a moment longer than is 
absolutely necessary. Would you like to have all the 
questions at once, or would you rather study them one 
after another?" 

He said he thought he could better give an undivided 

186 



A SEAKCH FOR CELEBRITY 

mind to each if he had them one at a time, and so we 
began with the first : 

"'1.. Would you advise the young story -writer to 
study the old masters in literature or the stories in the 
current magazines, in order to meet the demands of the 
current editors V " 

" Will you read that again ?" the author prominent- 
ly before the public demanded, but when we had read 
it a second time it seemed only to plunge him deeper 
into despair. He clutched his revered head with both 
hands, and but for an opportune baldness would prob- 
ably have torn his hair. He murmured, huskily, " Do 
you think you have got it right?" 

We avoided the response " Sure thing " by an appro- 
priate circumlocution, and then he thundered back: 
" How in — nature — is a young writer to forecast the 
demands of current editors ? If an editor is worth his 
salt — his Attic salt — he does not know himself what 
he wants, except by the eternal yearning of the editorial 
soul for something new and good. If he has any other 
demands, he is not a current editor, he is a stagnant 
editor. Is it possible that there is a superstition to the 
contrary 8" 

" Apparently." 

" Then that would account for many things. But 
go on." 

" Go on yourself. You have not answered the ques- 
tion." 

" Oh, by all means," the author sardonically an- 
swered ; " if the current editor has demands beyond 
freshness and goodness, let the young writer avoid the 
masters in literature and study the stories in the cur- 
rent magazines." 

" You are not treating the matter seriously," we 
expostulated. 

187 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

" Yes, I am — seriously, sadly, even tragically. I 
could not have imagined a condition of things so bad, 
even with the results all round us. Let us have the 
second question of your correspondent." 

" Here it is : ( 2. Has the unknown writer an equal 
chance with the well-known author, provided his work 
is up to the standard of the latter's V " 

" Of the latter's ?— of the latter's ?— of the latter's ?" 
Our friend whispered the phrase to himself before he 
groaned out : " What a frightful locution ! Really, 
really, it is more than I can bear !" 

" For the cause you ought to bear anything. What 
do you really think?" 

" Why, if the former's work is as good as the lat- 
ter's, why isn't the former's chance as good if the cur- 
rent editor's demands are for the same kind in the 
former's case as in the latter's ? If the latter's aim 
is to meet the imaginary demands of the stagnant editor, 
then the former's work ought to be as attractive as the 
latter's. Ha, ha, ha!" 

He laughed wildly, and in order to recall him to him- 
self we read the third question : " ' 3. Which is the 
more acceptable — a well-told story with a weak plot, or 
a poorly told story with a strong plot V " 

" Oh, but that is a conundrum, pure and simple !" 
the author protested. " It is a poor parody on the 
old End-man pleasantry, ' Would you rather be as 
foolish as you look, or look as foolish as you are?' 
You are making it up!" 

" We assure you we are not. It is no more a co- 
nundrum than the others. Come: question!" 

" Well, in the first place, I should like to know what 
a plot is. Something that has occurred to you primarily 
as an effect from your experience or observation ? Or 
something you have carpentered out of the old stuff of 

188 



A SEARCH FOR CELEBRITY 

your reading, with a wooden hero and heroine re- 
ciprocally dying for each other, and a wooden villain 
trying to foil them?" 

" You had better ask a current editor or a stagnant. 
Do you confess yourself posed by this plain problem? 
Do you give it up V 9 

" Por the present. Perhaps I may gather light from 
the next question." 

" Then here it is : ' 4. What do you consider the pri- 
mary weakness in the average stories or verses of the 
old writers?" 

" Oh, that is easy. The same as in the average 
stories and verses of the younger writers — absence of 
mind." 

" Are you sure you are not shirking ? Cannot you 
give a categorical answer — something that will really 
help some younger writer to take the place which you 
are now more or less fraudulently holding? The 
younger writers will cheerfully allow that the trouble 
is absence of mind, but what line of reading would 
you suggest which would turn this into presence of 
mind?" 

" There is none, except to have themselves newly 
ancestored. Presence of mind as well as absence of 
mind is something derived; you cannot acquire it." 

" We think you might be a little less sardonic. Now 
here is the next problem : ' 5. What are the successful 
author's necessary qualifications in the matters of nat- 
ural ability, education, life as he sees it and lives it, 
technical training, etc V " 

" This will be the death of me !" the prominent au- 
thor lamented. " Couldn't I skip that one ?" 

" It seems to cover some of the most important points. 
We do not think your self-respect will allow you to skip 
it. At any rate, make an effort to answer it." 

189 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

Thus challenged, the prominent author pulled him- 
self together. " Oh," he said, sadly, " which of us 
knows whether he has natural ability or not, and what 
is education, and what is life as one sees it, and what 
is technical training? Do these poor young fellows 
think that one is tall or short by taking thought ? It is 
the same as that, it seems to me; or if you prefer a 
mystical solution, I should say, if you have a longing, 
from your earliest consciousness, to write poetry or 
fiction, and cannot keep from doing it for any long 
time together, you are possibly born with a gift for it. 
But this may be altogether a mistake; it may be the 
effect of your early and incessant scribblings on the 
minds of spectators wholly incompetent to judge of your 
abilities, such as your fond parents. This must rather 
often happen if we can judge from what nine-tenths of 
what is called literature is composed of. If your long- 
ing to write is the real thing, or is not, still education 
will not help or hinder you in doing it. No man was 
ever yet taught any art. He may be taught a trade, 
and that is what most of the versing and prosing is, 
I suppose. If you have the gift, you will technically 
train yourself : that is, you will learn how to be simple 
and clear and honest. Charm you will have got from 
your great-grandfather or great-grandmother ; and life, 
which is only another sort of school, will not qualify 
you to depict life; but if you do not want to depict 
life, you will perhaps be able to meet the demands of 
what our friend calls the current editors." 

Here the prominent author rose, but we stayed him 
with a gesture. " There is another question, the last : 
' 6. Do you care to convey any hints or suggestions 
gleaned from your personal experiences in the climb 
to success that may make easier the gaining of the 

heights for the beginner?" 

190 



A SEARCH FOE CELEBRITY 

The prominent author roared with laughter. " Read 
that again!" But when we had done so, he became 
grave, even sorrowful. " Is it really true, then, as we 
seem to see, that there is a large body of young people 
taking up literature as a business ? The thing that all 
my life I have fondly dreamed was an art, dear and 
almost holy! Are they going into it for the money 
there is in it? And am I, in my prominence — more 
or less fraudulent, as you say — an incentive to them 
to persevere in their enterprises ? Is that what one has 
to come to after a life of conscientious devotion to — an 
ideal? Come, old friend, say it isn't so bad as that! 
It is ? Then " — the prominent author paused and sank 
weakly into the chair from which he had risen — " per- 
haps I have been dreaming all these years; but in my 
dream it seems to me that everything outside of myself 
which seemed to hinder me has really helped me. 
There has been no obstacle in my way which if I 
were at the bottom of the hill, where I might very 
rightfully be, I would have removed. I am glad that 
the climb to success, as your friend calls it, has been 
hard and long, and I bless God for my difficulties and 
backsets, all of them. Sometimes they seemed cruel; 
they filled me with despair and shame; but there was 
not one that did not make me stronger and fitter for 
my work, if I was fit for it. You know very well that 
in this art of ours we need all the strength we can 
get from our overthrows. There is no training that 
can ever make the true artist's work easy to him, and 
if he is a true artist he will suspect everything easily 
done as ill done. What comes hard and slow and hope- 
lessly, that is the thing which when we look at it we 
find is the thing that was worth doing. I had my 
downs with my ups, and when I was beginning the 
downs outnumbered the ups ten to one. For one manu- 

191 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

script accepted, and after the days of many years 
printed, I had a dozen rejected and rejected without 
delay. But every such rejection helped me. In some 
cases I had to swallow the bitter dose and own that the 
editor was right; but the bitter was wholesome. In 
other cases I knew that he was wrong, and then I set 
my teeth, and took my courage in both hands, and 
tried and tried with that rejected manuscript till the 
divinely appointed editor owned that I was right. But 
these are the commonplaces of literary biography. I 
don't brag of them ; and I have always tried to keep my 
head in such shape that even defeat has not swelled it 
beyond the No. 7 I began with. Why should I be so 
wicked as to help another and a younger man over the 
bad places ? If I could only gain his confidence I should 
like to tell him that these are the places that will 
strengthen his heart for the climb. But if he has a 
weak heart, he had better try some other road. There ! 
I have given you all the ( hints and suggestions from 
my experience ' that I can think of, and now let me go." 

Once more he rose, and once more we stayed him. 
" Yes," we said, " no doubt you think you have spoken 
honestly and faithfully, but you have addressed your- 
self to the wrong audience. You have spoken to artists, 
born and self-made, but artists can always manage 
without help. Your help was invoked in behalf of 
artisans, of adventurers, of speculators. What was 
wanted of you was a formula for the fabrication of 
gold bricks which would meet the demands of current 
dealers in that sort of wares." 

" But if I have never made gold bricks myself, or not 
knowingly V 9 

" Ah, that is what you say ! But do you suppose 

anybody will believe you?" 

The prominent author put on the hat which he flat- 
192 



A SEAECH FOR CELEBRITY 

tered himself was a No. 7, but which we could plainly 
see was a No. 12, and said, with an air of patronizing 
compassion, " You have sat here so long in your cush- 
ioned comfort, looking out on the publishing world, 
that you have become corrupt, cynical, pessimistic." 



XX 

PRACTICAL IMMORTALITY ON EARTH 

The talk at a dinner given by the Easy Chair to 
some of its most valued friends was of the life after 
death, and it will not surprise any experienced ob- 
server to learn that the talk went on amid much nn- 
serious chatter, with laughing irrelevancies more ap- 
propriate to the pouring of champagne, and the chang- 
ing of plates, than to the very solemn affair in hand. 
It may not really have been so very solemn. Nobody 
at table took the topic much to heart apparently. The 
women, some of them, affected an earnest attention, but 
were not uncheerful; others frankly talked of other 
things; some, at the farther end of the table, asked 
what a given speaker was saying; the men did not, in 
some cases, conceal that they were bored. 

" No," the first speaker said, after weighing the pros 
and cons, " for my part, I don't desire it. When I am 
through, here, I don't ask to begin again elsewhere." 

" And you don't expect to ?" his closest listener in- 
quired. 

" And I don't expect to." 

" It is curious," the closest listener went on, " how 
much our beliefs are governed by our wishes in this 
matter. When we are young and are still hungering 
for things to happen, we have a strong faith in im- 
mortality. When we are older, and the whole round 

194 



IMMORTALITY ON EARTH 

of things, except death, has happened, we think it very 
likely we shall not live again. It seems to be the same 
with peoples; the new peoples believe, the old peoples 
doubt. It occurs to very, very few men to be con- 
vinced, as a friend of mine has been convinced against 
the grain, of the reality of the life after death. I will 
not say by what means he was convinced, for that is not 
pertinent; but he was fully convinced, and he said to 
me: 'Personally, I would rather not live again, but it 
seems that people do. The facts are too many; the 
proofs I have had are irresistible; and I have had to 
give way to them in spite of my wish to reject 
them/ " 

" Yes," the first speaker said, " that is certainly an 
uncommon experience. You think that if I were per- 
fectly honest, I should envy him his experience ? Well, 
then, honestly, I don't." 

" No," the other rejoined, " I don't know that I ac- 
cuse your sincerity. But, may I ask, what are your 
personal objections to immortality?" 

" It wouldn't be easy to say. If I could have had 
my way, I would not have been at all. Speaking 
selfishly, as we always do when we speak truly, I have 
not had a great deal of happiness, though I have had a 
good deal of fun. But things seem to wear out. I like 
to laugh, and I have laughed, in my time, consumedly. 
But I find that the laugh goes out of the specific in- 
stances of laughability, just as grieving goes out of 
grief. The thing that at the first and third time 
amused me enormously leaves me sad at the fourth, or 
at least unmoved. You see, I can't trust immortality 
to be permanently interesting. The reasonable chances 
are that in the lapse of a few aeons I should find 
eternity hanging heavy on my hands. But it isn't 

that, exactly, and it would be hard to say what my ob- 

105 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

jection to immortality exactly is. It would be simpler 
to say what it really is. It is personal, temperamental, 
congenital. I was born, I suspect, an indifferentist, as 
far as this life is concerned, and as to another life, I 
have an acquired antipathy." 

" That is curious, but not incredible, and of course 
not inconceivable," the closest listener assented. 

" I'm not so sure of that," a light skirmisher broke 
his silence for the first time. " Do you mean to say," 
he asked of the first speaker, " that you would not mind 
being found dead in your bed to-morrow morning, and 
that you would rather like it if that were actually the 
end of you ?" 

The first speaker nodded his head over the glass he 
had just emptied, and having swallowed its contents 
hastily, replied, " Precisely." 

" Then you have already, at your age, evolved that 
' instinct of death/ which MetchnikofF, in his strange 
book, thinks the race will come to when men begin 
living rightly, and go living on to a hundred and fifty 
years or more, as they once did." 

" Who is Metchnikoff, and what is the name of his 
strange book?" the light skirmisher cut in. 

"He's the successor of Pasteur in the Pasteur In- 
stitute at Paris, and his book is called The Nature of 
Man." 

" That blighting book !" One of the women who 
had caught on to the drift of the talk contributed this 
anguished suspiration. 

"Blighting? Is it blighting?" the first speaker 
parleyed. 

" Don't you call it blighting," she returned, " to be 
told not only that you are the descendant of an anthro- 
poid ape — we had got used to that — but of an anthro- 
poid ape gone wrong V 9 

196 



IMMORTALITY ON EARTH 

" Sort of simian degenerate," the light skirmisher 
formulated the case. " We are merely apes in error." 

The closest listener put this playfulness by. " What 
seems to me a fundamental error of that book is its 
constant implication of a constant fear of death. I 
can very well imagine, or I can easily allow, that we 
are badly made, and that there are all sorts of ' dis- 
harmonies/ as Metchnikoff calls them, in us; but my 
own experience is that we are not all the time thinking 
about death and dreading it, either in earlier or later 
life, and that elderly people think less about it, if any- 
thing, than younger people. His contention for an 
average life four or five times longer than the present 
average life seems to be based upon an obscure sense 
of the right of a man to satisfy that instinct of life 
here on earth which science forbids him to believe he 
shall satisfy hereafter." 

" Well, I suppose," the first speaker said, " that 
Metchnikoff may err in his premises through a tempera- 
mental ' disharmony ' of Kussian nature rather than of 
less specific human nature. The great Russian authors 
seem to recognize that perpetual dread of death in them- 
selves and their readers which we don't recognize in 
ourselves or our Occidental friends and neighbors. 
Other people don't think of death so much as he sup- 
poses, and when they do they don't dread it so much. 
But I think he is still more interestingly wrong in 
supposing that the young are less afraid of death than 
the old because they risk their lives more readily. 
That is not from indifference to death, it is from in- 
experience of life ; they haven't learned yet the dangers 
which beset it and the old have ; that is all." 

" I don't know but you're right," the first speaker 
said. " And I couldn't see the logic of Metchnikoff 's 
position in regard to the ' instinct of death ' which he 

197 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

expects us to develop after we have lived, say, a hun- 
dred and thirty or forty years, so that at a hundred 
and fifty we shall be glad to go, and shall not want 
anything but death after we die. The apparent line 
of his argument is that in youth we have not the in- 
stinct of life so strongly but that we willingly risk life. 
Then, until we live to a hundred and thirty or forty 
or so, we have the instinct of life so strongly that we 
are anxious to shun death; lastly the instinct of death 
grows in us and we are eager to lay down life. I don't 
see how or why this should be. As a matter of fact, 
children dread death far more than men who are not 
yet old enough to have developed the instinct of it. 
Still, it's a fascinating and suggestive book." 

" But not enough so to console us for the precious 
hope of living again which it takes away so pitilessly," 
said the woman who had followed the talk. 

" Is that such a very precious hope ?" the first speaker 
asked. 

" I know you pretend not," she said, " but I don't 
believe you." 

" Then you think that the dying, who almost uni- 
versally make a good end, are buoyed up by that hope ?" 

" I don't see why they shouldn't be. I know it's the 
custom for scientific people to say that the resignation 
of the dying is merely part of the general sinking and 
so is just physical; but they can't prove that. Else 
why should persons who are condemned to death be 
just as much resigned to it as the sick and even more 
exalted ?" 

" Ah," the light skirmisher put in, " some of the sci- 
entific people dispose of that point very simply. They 
say it's self-hypnotism." 

" Well, but they can't prove that, either," she re- 
torted. Then she went on : " Besides, the dying are not 

198 



IMMORTALITY ON EARTH 

almost universally willing to die. Sometimes they are 
very unwilling: and they seem to be unwilling because 
they have no hope of living again. Why wouldn't it 
be just as reasonable to suppose that we could evolve 
the instinct of death by believing in the life hereafter 
as by living here a hundred and fifty years ? For the 
present, it's as easy to do the one as the other." 

" But not for the future/' the first speaker said. 
" As you suggest, it may be just as reasonable to think 
we can evolve the instinct of death by faith as by 
longevity, but it isn't as scientific." 

" What M. MetchnikofT wants is the scientific cer- 
tainty — which we can have only by beginning to live a 
century and a half apiece — that the coming man will 
not be afraid to die." This, of course, was from the 
light skirmisher. 

The woman contended, " The coming man may be 
scientifically resigned if he prefers, but the going man, 
the gone man, was rapturously ready to die, in untold 
thousands of martyrdoms, because he believed that he 
should live again." 

The first speaker smiled compassionately, and per- 
haps also a little patronizingly. " I'm not sure that 
you have met the point exactly. MetchnikofT denies, 
on the basis of scientific knowledge, that it is possible 
for a man, being dead, to live again. In those two 
extremely interesting chapters of his, which treat of 
the c Religious Remedies ' and the ' Philosophical 
Remedies ' for the ' disharmonies of the human con- 
stitution,' he is quite as unsparing of the sages as of 
the saints. The Christians and the Buddhists fare no 
worse than Plato and the Stoics; the last are no less 
unscientific than the first in his view, and no less fal- 
lacious. What he asks is not that we shall be resigned 
or enraptured in view of death, but that we shall physi- 

199 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

call j desire it when we are tired of living, just as we 
physically desire sleep when we are tired of waking." 

" And to that end," the light skirmisher said, " he 
asks nothing but that we shall live a hundred and fifty 
years." 

" No, he asks that we shall live such natural lives 
that we shall die natural deaths, which are voluntary 
deaths. He contends that most of us now die accidental 
and violent deaths." 

The woman who had caught on demanded, " Why 
does he think we could live a century and a half ?" 

" From analogies in the lives of other animals and 
from the facts of our constitution. He instances the 
remarkable cases of longevity recorded in the Bible." 

" I think he's very inconsistent," his pursuer con- 
tinued. " The Bible says men lived anywhere from a 
hundred to nine hundred years, and he thinks it quite 
possible. The Bible says that men live after death, and 
he thinks that's impossible." 

" Well, have you ever met a man who had lived after 
death ?" the first speaker asked. 

" No. Have you ever met a man two hundred years 
old % If it comes to undeniable proof there is far more 
proof of ghosts than of bicentenarians." 

" Very well, then, I get out of it by saying that I 
don't believe in either." 

" And leave Metchnikoff in the lurch !" the light 
skirmisher reproached him. " You don't believe in the 
instinct of death! And I was just going to begin liv- 
ing to a hundred and fifty and dying voluntarily by 
leaving off cheese. Now I will take some of the Gor- 
gonzola." 

Everybody laughed but the first speaker and the 
woman who had caught on; they both looked rather 
grave, and the closest listener left off laughing soonest. 

200 



IMMORTALITY ON EARTH 

" We can't be too grateful to science for its devotion 
to truth. But isn't it possible for it to overlook one 
kind of truth in looking for another? Isn't it im- 
aginable that when a certain anthropoid ape went wrong 
and blundered into a man, he also blundered into a 
soul, and as a slight compensation for having invol- 
untarily degenerated from his anthropoid ancestor, 
came into the birthright of eternal life ?" 

" It's imaginable," the first speaker granted. " But 
science leaves imagining things to religion and phi- 
losophy." 

" Ah, that's just where you're mistaken !" the woman 
who had caught on exclaimed. " Science does nothing 
but imagine things !" 

" Well, not quite," the light skirmisher mocked. 

She persisted unheeding : " First the suggestion from 
the mystical somewhere — the same where, probably, 
that music and pictures and poetry come from; then 
the hypothesis; then the proof; then the established 
fact. Established till some new scientist comes along 
and knocks it over." 

" It would be very interesting if some one would 
proceed hypothetically concerning the soul and its im- 
mortality, as the scientific people do in their inquiries 
concerning the origin of man, electricity, disease, and 
the rest." 

" Yes," the light skirmisher agreed. " Why doesn't 
some fellow bet himself that he has an undying soul 
and then go on to accumulate the proofs ?" The others 
seemed now to have touched bottom in the discussion, 
and he launched a random inquiry upon the general 
silence. " By-the-way, I wonder why women are so 
much more anxious to live again than men, as a general 
thing." 

" Because they don't feel," one of them at table 
14 201 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

ventured, " that they have had a fair chance 
here." 

" Oh ! I thought maybe they felt that they hadn't 
had their say." 

" Is it quite certain," the closest listener asked, " that 
they are more anxious to live again than men?" He 
looked round at the ladies present, and at first none of 
them answered; perhaps because they feared the men 
would think them weak if they owned to a greater 
longing than themselves for immortality. 

Finally the woman who had caught on said : " I 
don't know whether it's so or not; and I don't think it 
matters. But I don't mind saying that I long to live 
again; I am not ashamed of it. I don't think very 
much of myself ; but I'm interested in living. Then " 
— she dropped her voice a little — " there are some I 
should like to see again. I have known people — char- 
acters — natures — that I can't believe are wasted. And 
those that were dear to us and that we have lost — " 

She stopped, and the first speaker now looked at her 
with a compassion unalloyed by patronage, and did 
not ask, as he might, " What has all that to do with it ?" 

In fact, a sympathetic silence possessed the whole 
company. It was broken at last by the closest listener's 
saying : " After all, I don't know that MetchnikofT's 
book is so very blighting. It's certainly a very im- 
portant book, and it produces a reaction which may be 
wholesome or unwholesome as you choose to think. 
And no matter what we believe, we must respect the 
honesty of the scientific attitude in regard to a matter 
that has been too much abandoned to the emotions, per- 
haps. In all seriousness I wish some scientific man 
would apply the scientific method to finding out the 
soul, as you " — he turned to the light skirmisher — 
" suggest. Why shouldn't it be investigated ?" 

202 



IMMORTALITY ON EARTH 

Upon this invitation the light skirmisher tried to 
imagine some psychological experiments which should 
bear a certain analogy to those of the physicists, but he 
failed to keep the level of his suggestion. 

" As I said/' the closest listener remarked, " he pro- 
duces a secondary state of revolt which is desirable, 
for in that state we begin to inquire not only where 
we stand, but where he stands." 

" And what is your conclusion as to his place in the 
inquiry ?" 

" That it isn't different from yours or mine, really. 
We all share the illusion of the race from the beginning 
that somehow our opinion of the matter affects its real- 
ity. I should distinguish so far as to say that we think 
we believe, and he thinks he knows. For my own part, 
I have the impression that he has helped my belief." 

The light skirmisher made a desperate effort to re- 
trieve himself : " Then a few more books like his would 
restore the age of faith." 



XXI 

AROUND A RAINY-DAY FIRE 

A number of the Easy Chair's friends were sitting 
round the fire in the library of a eountry-lionse. The 
room was large and full of a soft, flattering light. The 
fire was freshly kindled, and flashed and crackled with 
a young vivacity, letting its rays frolic over the serried 
bindings on the shelves, the glazed pictures on the walls, 
the cups of after-luncheon coffee in the hands of the 
people, and the tall jugs and pots in the tray left stand- 
ing on the library table. It was summer, but a cold 
rain was falling forbiddingly without. ]^o one else 
could come, and no one could wish to go. The con- 
ditions all favored a just self-esteem, and a sense of 
providential preference in the accidental assemblage of 
those people at that time and place. 

The talk was rather naturally, though not neces- 
sarily, of books, and one of the people was noting that 
children seemed to like short stories because their minds 
had not the strength to keep the facts of a whole book. 
The effort tired them, and they gave it up, not be- 
cause a book did not interest them, but because it ex- 
hausted their little powers. They were good for a 
leap, or a dash, or a short flight in literature, even 
very high literature, but they had not really the force 
for anything covering greater time and space. 

Another declared this very suggestive, and declared 
it in such a way that the whole company perceived he 

204 



AROUND A RAINY-DAY FIRE 

had something behind his words, and besought him to 
say what he meant. He did so, as well as he could, 
after protesting that it was not very novel, or if so, 
perhaps not very important, and if it was important, 
perhaps it was not true. They said they would take 
the chances; and then he said that it was merely a 
notion which had occurred to him at the moment con- 
cerning the new reading of the new reading public, 
whether it might not be all juvenile literature, adapted 
in mature terms to people of physical adolescence but 
of undeveloped thinking and feeling: not really feeble- 
minded youth, but aesthetically and intellectually chil- 
dren, who might presently grow into the power of en- 
joying and digesting food for men. By-and-by they 
might gather fortitude for pleasure in real literature, 
in fiction which should not be a travesty of the old 
fairy-tales, or stories of adventures among giants and 
robbers and pirates, or fables with human beings speak- 
ing from the motives and passions of animals. He 
mentioned fiction, he said, because the new reading of 
the new reading public seemed to be nearly altogether 
fiction. 

All this had so much the effect of philosophical 
analysis that those comfortable people were lulled into 
self - approving assent ; and putting themselves alto- 
gether apart from the new reading public, they begged 
him to say what he meant. He answered that there 
was nothing more phenomenal in the modern American 
life; and he paid a pretty tribute to their ignorance 
in owning that he was not surprised they knew nothing 
of that public. He promised that he would try to de- 
fine it, and he began by remarking that it seemed to be 
largely composed of the kind of persons who at the 
theatre audibly interpret the action to one another. 
The present company must have heard them? 

205 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

His listeners again assented. Was the new reading 
public drawn from the theatre-going, or more definitely 
speaking, the matinee class? 

There was something odd, there, the philosopher re- 
turned. The matinee class was as large as ever : larger ; 
while the new reading public, perfectly interchangeable 
with it in its intellectual pleasure and experiences, had 
suddenly outnumbered it a thousandfold. The popular 
novel and the popular play were so entirely of one 
fibre and texture, and so easily convertible, that a new 
novel was scarcely in every one's bread-trough before 
it was on the boards of all the theatres. This led some 
to believe that we were experiencing a revival of the 
drama, and that if we kept on having authors who sold 
half a million copies we could not help having a Shake- 
speare by-and-by : he must follow. 

One of those listening asked, But how had these peo- 
ple begun so instantaneously to form themselves into 
this new innumerable reading public ? If they were of 
that quality of mind which requires the translation of 
an unmistakable meaning from the players to the play- 
goers, they must find themselves helpless when grap- 
pling in solitude with the sense of a book. Why did 
not they go increasingly to the theatre instead of turn- 
ing so overwhelmingly to the printed word ? 

The philosopher replied that they had not now be- 
gun to do this, but only seemed to have begun, since 
there really was no beginning in anything. The read- 
ers had always been in the immense majority, because 
they could read anywhere, and they could see plays 
only in the cities and towns. If the theatre were uni- 
versal, undoubtedly they would prefer plays, because 
a play makes far less draft upon the mental capacities 
or energies than the silliest book; and what seemed 
their effort to interpret it to one another might very 

206 



AROUND A RAINY-DAY FIRE 

well be the exchange of their delight in it. The books 
they preferred were of the nature of poor plays, full of 
" easy things to understand/' cheap, common incidents, 
obvious motives, and vulgar passions, such as had been 
used a thousand times over in literature. They were 
fitted for the new reading public for this reason; the 
constant repetition of the same characters, events, 
scenes, plots, gave their infantile minds the pleasure 
which children find in having a story told over and 
over in exactly the same terms. The new reading pub- 
lic would rebel against any variance, just as chil- 
dren do. 

The most of the company silently acquiesced, or at 
least were silent, but one of them made the speaker 
observe that he had not told them what this innumer- 
able unreasoning multitude had read before the present 
plague of handsome, empty, foolish duodecimos had in- 
fested everybody's bread-trough. 

The philosopher said the actual interior form of non- 
literary literature was an effect of the thin spread of 
our literary culture, and outwardly was the effect of 
the thick spread of our material prosperity. The 
dollar-and-a-half novel of to-day was the dime novel 
of yesterday in an avatar which left its essence un- 
changed. It was even worse, for it was less sincerely 
and forcibly written, and it could not be so quickly 
worn out and thrown away. Its beauty of paper, print, 
and binding gave it a claim to regard which could not 
be ignored, and established for it a sort of right to lie 
upon the table, and then stand upon the shelf, where 
it seemed to relate itself to genuine literature, and to 
be of the same race and lineage. As for this vast new 
reading public, it was the vast old reading public with 
more means in its pocket of satisfying its crude, child- 
ish taste. Its head was the same empty head. 

207 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

There was a sort of dreadful finality in this, and for 
a while no one spoke. Then some one tried in vain to 
turn the subject, while the philosopher smiled upon 
the desolation he had made; and then one of that sex 
which when satisfied of the truth likes to have its 
" sense of satisfaction ache " through the increase of 
conviction, asked him why the English reading public, 
which must be so much more cultivated than our new 
reading public, seemed to like the same sort of puerile 
effects in works of imagination, the stirring incidents, 
the well-worn plots, the primitive passions, and the ro- 
bustious incentives. He owned the fact, but he con- 
tended that the fact, though interesting, was not so 
mysterious as it appeared at first sight. It could be 
explained that the English had never taken the im- 
agination very seriously, and that in their dense, close 
civilization, packed tight with social, political, and ma- 
terial interests, they asked of the imagination chiefly 
excitement and amusement. They had not turned to it 
for edification or instruction, for that thrill of solemn 
joy which comes of vital truth profoundly seen and 
clearly shown. For this reason when all Europe be- 
sides turned her face to the light, some decades ago, 
in the pages of the great prose poets who made the age 
illustrious, England preferred the smoky links and 
dancing damp-fires which had pleased her immature 
fancy, and kept herself well in the twilight of the old 
ideal of imagination as the mother of unrealities. 
There could be no doubt, the philosopher thought, 
that the recrudescence which her best wits recognized 
as the effects of this perversity, was the origin of the 
preposterous fiction which we now feed to the new read- 
ing public, and which we think must somehow be right 
because it was hers and is ours, and has the sanction 
of race and tradition. 

2Q8 



ABOUND A RAINY-DAY FIRE 

It was not, lie continued, a thing to shed the tear 
of unavailing regret for, though it was not a transitory 
phase, or a state of transition, for the condition that 
now existed had always existed. The new reading pub- 
lic was larger than ever before not merely because 
there was a fresh demand for reading, but because more 
people were lettered and moneyed and leisured, and did 
not know what otherwise to do with themselves. It 
was quite simple, and the fact was less to be regretted 
in itself than for an indirect result which might be 
feared from it. He paused at this, in order to be asked 
what this result was, and being promptly asked he 
went on. 

It was, he said, the degradation of authorship as a 
calling, in the popular regard. He owned that in the 
past authorship had enjoyed too much honor in the 
reverence and affection of the world: not always, in- 
deed, but at certain times. As long as authors were 
the clients and dependents of the great, they could not 
have been the objects of a general interest or honor. 
They had then passed the stage when the simple poet 
or story-teller was wont to 

— sit upon the ground, 
And tell sad stories of the deaths of kings, 

to wondering and admiring circles of simple listeners, 
and they had not yet come to that hour of authorship 
when it reverted to the peasantry, now turned people, 
and threw itself upon the people's generous acceptance 
and recognition for bread and fame. But when that 
hour came, it brought with it the honor of a reverent 
and persistent curiosity concerning literature and the 
literary life, which the philosopher said he was afraid 
could not survive the actual superabundance of au- 
thors and the transformation of the novelist into the 

209 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

artisan. There seemed, he pursued, a fixed formula 
for the manufacture of a work of fiction, to be studied 
and practised like any other. Literature was degraded 
from an art to a poor sort of science, in the practical 
application of which thousands were seen prospering; 
for the immense output of our press represented the 
industry of hundreds and thousands. A book was con- 
cocted, according to a patent recipe, advertised, and 
sold like any other nostrum, and perhaps the time was 
already here when it was no longer more creditable to 
be known as the author of a popular novel than as the 
author of a popular medicine, a Pain-killer, a Sooth- 
ing Syrup, a Vegetable Compound, a Horse Liniment, 
or a Germicide. Was it possible, he asked, for a reader 
of the last book selling a hundred thousand copies to 
stand in the loving or thrilling awe of the author that 
we used to feel for Longfellow and Tennyson, for 
Emerson and Carlyle, for Hawthorne and George Eliot, 
for Irving and Scott, or for any of their great elders or 
youngers ? He repeated that perhaps authorship had 
worked its worshippers too hard, but there was no doubt 
that their worship was a genuine devotion. Eor at 
least a hundred and fifty years it had been eagerly 
offered in a full acceptance of the Schiller superstition 
that at the sharing of the earth the poet, representing 
authorship, had been so much preoccupied with higher 
things that he had left the fleshpots and the loaves and 
fishes to others, and was to be compensated with a share 
of the divine honors paid to Jove himself. Erom 
Goethe to Carlyle, what a long roll of gods, demi- 
gods, and demisemigods it was! It might have been 
bad for the deities, and the philosopher rather thought 
it was, but burning incense on the different shrines 
was an excellent thing for the votaries, and kept them 
out of all sorts of mischiefs, low pleasures, and vain 

210 



ABOUND A RAINY-DAY FIRE 

amusements. Whether that was really so or not, the 
doubt remained whether authorship was not now a 
creed outworn. Did tender maids and virtuous ma- 
trons still cherish the hope of some day meeting their 
literary idols in the flesh ? Did generous youth aspire 
to see them merely at a distance, and did doting sires 
teach their children that it was an epoch-making event 
when a great poet or novelist visited the country; or 
when they passed afar, did they whip some favored 
boy, as the father of Benvenuto Cellini whipped him 
at sight of a salamander in the fire that he might not 
forget the prodigy? Now that the earth had been di- 
vided over again, and the poet in his actual guise of 
novelist had richly shared in its goods with the farmer, 
the noble, the merchant, and the abbot, was it necessary 
or even fair that he should be the guest of heaven ? In 
other words, now that every successful author could 
keep his automobile, did any one want his autograph ? 
In the silence that fell upon the company at these 
words, the ticking of the clock under its classic pedi- 
ment on the mantel was painfully audible, and had the 
effect of intimating that time now had its innings and 
eternity was altogether out of it. Several minutes 
seemed to pass before any one had the courage to ask 
whether the degradation of authorship was not partially 
the result of the stand taken by the naturalists in Zola, 
who scorned the name of art for his calling and aspired 
to that of science. The hardy adventurer who sug- 
gested this possibility said that it was difficult to im- 
agine the soul stirred to the same high passion by the 
botanist, the astronomer, the geologist, the electrician, 
or even the entomologist as in former times by the poet, 
the humorist, the novelist, or the playwright. If the 
fictionist of whatever sort had succeeded in identify- 
ing himself with the scientist, he must leave the en- 

211 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

joyment of divine honors to the pianist, the farce- 
comedian, the portrait-painter, the emotional actor, and 
the architect, who still deigned to practise an art. 

The philosopher smiled, and owned that this was 
very interesting, and opened np a fresh field of in- 
quiry. The first question there was whether the im- 
aginative author were not rather to blame for not hav- 
ing gone far enough in the scientific direction in the 
right scientific fashion than for having taken that 
course at all. The famous reproach of poetry made 
by Huxley, that it was mostly " sensual caterwauling," 
might well have given the singer pause in striking the 
sympathetic catgut of his lyre : perhaps the strings were 
metallic; but no matter. The reproach had a justice 
in it that must have stung, and made the lyrist wish 
to be an atomic theorist at any cost. In fact, at that 
very moment science had, as it were, caught the bread 
out of fiction's mouth, and usurped the highest func- 
tions of imagination. In almost every direction of its 
recent advance it had made believe that such and such 
a thing was so, and then proceeded to prove it. To this 
method we owed not only the possession of our present 
happy abundance of microbes in every sort, but our 
knowledge of the universe in almost every respect. 
Science no longer waited for the apple to fall before 
inferring a law of gravitation, but went about with a 
stick knocking fruit off every bough in the hope that 
something suggestive would come of it. On make- 
believes of all kinds it based the edifices of all kinds 
of eternal veracities. It behooved poetry, or fiction, 
which was radically the same, to return to its earliest 
and simplest devices if it would find itself in the em- 
brace of science, and practise the make-beliefs of its 
infancy. Out of so many there were chances of some 
coming true if they were carried far enough and long 

212 



AROUND A RAINY-DAY FIRE 

enough. In fact, the hypothetical method of science 
had apparently been used in the art of advertising the 
works in which the appetite of the new reading public 
was flattered. The publishers had hypothesized from 
the fact of a population of seventy millions, the exist- 
ence of an immense body of raw, coarse minds, un- 
touched by taste or intelligence, and boldly addressed 
the new fiction to it. As in many suppositions of sci- 
ence their guess proved true. 

Then why, the hardy listener who had spoken be- 
fore inquired, was not make-believe the right method 
for the author, if it was the right method for the sci- 
entist and the publisher ? Why should not the novelist 
hypothesize cases hitherto unknown to experience, and 
then go on by persistent study to find them true? It 
seemed to this inquirer that the mistake of fiction, 
when it refused longer to be called an art and wished 
to be known as a science, was in taking up the ob- 
solescent scientific methods, and in accumulating facts, 
or human documents, and deducing a case from them, 
instead of boldly supposing a case, as the new science 
did, and then looking about for occurrences to verify it. 

The philosopher said, Exactly; this was the very 
thing he was contending for. The documents should be 
collected in support of the hypothesis; the hypothesis 
should not be based on documents already collected. 
First the inference, then the fact ; was not that the new 
scientific way? It looked like it; and it seemed as if 
the favorite literature of the new reading public were 
quite in the spirit of the new science. Its bold events, 
its prodigious characters, its incredible motives, were 
not they quite of the nature of the fearless conjecture 
which imagined long and short electric waves and then 
spread a mesh of wire to intercept them and seize their 
message ? 

213 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

The hardy inquirer demanded: Then if so, why de- 
spise the literature of the new reading public? Why 
despise the new reading public, anyway? 

The philosopher responded that he despised nothing, 
not even a thing so unphilosophical as modern science. 
He merely wished his interpellant to observe again that 
the unification of the literary spirit and the scientific 
spirit was degrading the literary man to the level of the 
scientific man. He thought this was bad for the small 
remnant of mankind, who in default of their former 
idolatry might take to the worship of themselves. Now, 
however bad a writer might be, it was always well for 
the reader to believe him better than himself. If we 
had not been brought up in this superstition, what 
would have become of the classics of all tongues ? But 
for this, what was to prevent the present company from 
making a clearance of three-fourths of the surrounding 
shelves and feeding that dying flame on the hearth % 

At this the host, who had been keeping himself in a 
modest abeyance, came forward and put some sticks on 
the fire. He said he would like to see any one touch 
his bindings; which seemed to be his notion of books. 
Nobody minded him ; but one of those dutyolators, who 
abound in a certain sex, asked the philosopher what he 
thought we ought to do for the maintenance of author- 
worship among us. 

He answered, he had not thought of that; his mind 
had been fixed upon the fact of its decay. But per- 
haps something could be done by looking up the author 
whose book had sold least during the season, and ask- 
ing him candidly whether he would not like to be paid 
the divine honors now going begging from one big 
seller to another ; for the decay of author-worship must 
be as much from the indifference of the authors as from 
the irreverence of the readers. If such a low-selling 

214 



ABOUND A RAINY-DAY FIRE 

author did not seem to regard it as rather invidious, 
then pay him the divine honors; it might be a whole- 
some and stimulating example; but perhaps we should 
afterward have the demigod on our hands. Something 
might be safelier done by writing, as with the present 
company, and inquiring into " the present condition of 
polite learning." This would keep the sacred flame 
alive, and give us the comfort of refined association in 
an exquisite moment of joy from the sense of our su- 
periority to other people. That, after all, was the 
great thing. 

The company drew a little closer round the fire. 
The rain beat upon the panes, and the wind swept the 
wet leaves against them, while each exhaled a sigh of 
aspiration not unmixed with a soft regret. 



XXII 

THE ADVANTAGES OF QUOTATIONAL CRITICISM 

The talk round the Easy Chair one day was of 
that strange passion for reading which has of late pos- 
sessed the public, and the contagion or infection by 
which it has passed to hundreds of thousands who never 
read before; and then the talk was of how this pro- 
digious force might be controlled and turned in the 
right way : not suffered to run to waste like water over 
the dam, but directed into channels pouring upon 
wheels that turn the mills of the gods or something 
like that. There were, of course, a great many words; 
in fact, talk is composed of words, and the people at 
that luncheon were there for talking as well as eating, 
and they did not mind how many words they used. 
But the sum of their words was the hope, after a due 
season of despair, that the present passion for reading 
might be made to eventuate in more civilization than 
it seemed to be doing, if it could be brought back to 
good literature, supposing it was ever there in great 
strength, and the question was how to do this. 

One of the company said he had lately been reading 
a good many books of Leigh Hunt's, and after every- 
body had interrupted with " Delightful !" " Perfectly 
charming !" and the like, he went on to observe that one 
of the chief merits of Hunt seemed to be his aptness in 
quotation. That, he remarked, was almost a lost art 

216 



THE ADVANTAGES OF CEITICISM 

with critics, who had got to thinking that they could 
tell better what an author was than the author him- 
self could. Like every other power disused, the power 
of apt quotation had died, and there were very few 
critics now who knew how to quote: not one knew, as 
Hunt, or Lamb, or Hazlitt, or the least of the great 
quotational school of critics, knew. These had perhaps 
overworked their gift, and might have been justly ac- 
cused, as they certainly were accused, of misleading 
the reader and making him think that the poets, whose 
best they quoted, putting the finest lines in italics so 
that they could not be missed, were as good throughout 
as in the passages given. It was this sense of having 
abused innocence, or ignorance, which led to the pres- 
ent reaction in criticism no doubt, and yet the present 
reaction was an error. Suppose that the poets whose 
best was given by quotation were not altogether as good 
as that % The critics never pretended they were ; they 
were merely showing how very good these poets could 
be, and at the same time offering a delicate pleasure 
to the reader, who could not complain that his digestion 
was overtaxed by the choice morsels. If his pleasure 
in them prompted him to go to the entire poet quoted, 
in the hope of rioting gluttonously upon him, the reader 
was rightly served in one sense. In another, he was 
certainly not misserved or his time wasted. It would 
be hard for him to prove that he could have employed 
it more profitably. 

Everybody, more or less, now sat up, and he who had 
the eye and ear of the table went on to remark that he 
had not meant to make a defence of the extinct school 
of quotational criticism. What he really meant to do 
was to suggest a way out of the present situation in 
which the new multitude of voracious readers were 
grossly feeding upon such intellectual husks as swine 

15 " 217 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

would not eat, and imagining themselves nourished by 
their fodder. There might be some person present who 
could improve upon his suggestion, but his notion, as 
he conceived it, was that something might be done in 
the line of quotational criticism to restore the great 
poets to the public favor, for he understood that good 
authors were now proportionately less read than they 
once were. He thought that a pity: and the rest of 
the company joined in asking him how he proposed to 
employ the quotational method for his purpose. 

In answering he said that he would not go outside 
of the English classics, and he would, for the present, 
deal only with the greatest of these. He took it for 
granted that those listening were all agreed that man- 
kind would be advantaged in their minds or man- 
ners by a more or less familiar acquaintance with 
Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, 
Cowper, Burns, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shel- 
ley, Keats, Tennyson, and Browning; he himself did 
not mind adding Scott to the list, whose poetry he 
found much better than his prose. To bring about an 
acquaintance which might very profitably ripen into in- 
timacy, he would have each of these poets treated in 
the whole measure of his work as many or most of 
them had been topically or partially treated by the 
quotational critics. Some one here made him observe 
that he was laying out rather a large piece of work, 
and to this he answered, Not at all ; the work had been 
already done. Asked then, somewhat derisively, why 
it need be done over again, he explained, with a modesty 
and patience which restored him to the regard he had 
lost by the derision (all had impartially united in it), 
that though the work had already been done, there 
needed some slight additions to it which would easily 
fit it to his purpose. He was not thinking of going in 

218 



THE ADVANTAGES OF CKITICISM 

for one of those dreadful series of books which seemed 
the dismay alike of publisher and reader, and required 
rewriting of matter more than enough rewritten. In 
fact, he said, that for his purpose the writing was done 
fully and probably better than it could be done again, 
and it was only the reading and quoting that demanded 
editorial attention. 

Another said he did not see how that could be, and 
the inventor of the brave scheme, which was still in 
petto,, said that he would try to show him. We had, 
he contended, only too great riches in the criticisms of 
the poets open to our choice, but suppose we took 
Spenser and let Lowell introduce him to us. There 
would be needed a very brief biographical note, and 
then some able hand to intersperse the criticism with 
passages from Spenser, or with amplifications of the 
existing quotations, such as would give a full notion of 
the poet's scope and quality. The story of each of his 
poems could be given in a few words, where the poems 
themselves could not be given even in part, and with 
the constant help of the critic the reader could be pos- 
sessed of a luminous idea of the poet, such as he prob- 
ably could not get by going to him direct, though this 
was not to be deprecated, but encouraged, after the pre- 
paratory acquaintance. The explanatory and illustra- 
tive passages could be interpolated in the text of the 
criticism without interrupting the critic, and something 
for Spenser might thus be done on the scale of what 
Addison did for Milton. It was known how those suc- 
cessive papers in the Spectator had rehabilitated one 
of the greatest English poets, or, rather, rehabilitated 
the English public, and restored the poet and the pub- 
lic to each other. They formed almost an ideal body 
of criticism, and if they did not embody all that the 
reader need know of Milton, they embodied so much 

219 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

that he could no longer feel himself ignorant of Hilton. 
In fact, they possesed him of a high degree of Mil- 
tonian culture, which was what one wanted to have 
with respect to any poet. They might be extended 
with still greater quotation, and if something more yet 
were needed the essay on Milton which made Mac- 
aulay's reputation might be employed as a vessel to 
catch the overrunnings of the precious ichor. 

Who could not wish to know the poetry of Keats as 
we already knew his life through the matchless essay 
of Lowell ? That might be filled out with the most 
striking passages of his poetry, simply let in at appro- 
priate places, without breaking the flow of that high 
discourse, and forming a rich accompaniment which 
could leave no reader unpleasured or uninstructed. 
The passages given from the poet need not be relevant 
to the text of the critic; they might be quite irrelevant 
and serve the imaginable end still better. For in- 
stance, some passages might be given in the teeth of 
the critic, and made to gainsay what he had been say- 
ing. This would probably send the reader, if he was 
very much perplexed, to the poet himself, which was 
the imaginable end. He might be disappointed one 
way or he might be disappointed the other way, but 
in the mean while he would have passed his time, 
and he would have instructed if he had not amused 
himself. 

It would be very interesting to take such a criticism 

as that of Lowell on Dryden and give not only the 

fine things from him, but the things that counted for 

the critic in his interesting contention that Dryden 

failed of being a prime poet because of the great weight 

of prose in him, and very good prose; or, as the critic 

charmingly put it, he had wings that helped him run 

along the ground, but did not enable him to fly. It 

220 



THE ADVANTAGES OF CRITICISM 

would be most valuable for us to see how Dryden was 
a great literary man, but not one of the greatest poets, 
and yet must be ranked as a great poet. If the balance 
inclined now toward this opinion, and now against it, 
very possibly the reader would find himself impelled 
to turn to the poet's work, and again the imaginable 
end would be served. 

A listener here asked why the talker went chiefly to 
Lowell for the illustration of his theory, and was frank- 
ly answered, For the same reason that he had first 
alluded to Leigh Hunt: because he had lately been 
reading him. It was not because he had not read any 
other criticism, or not that he entirely admired Low- 
elPs; in fact, he often found fault with that. Lowell 
was too much a poet to be a perfect critic. He was no 
more the greatest sort of critic than Dryden was the 
greatest sort of poet. To turn his figure round, he had 
wings that lifted him into the air when he ought to be 
running along the ground. 

The company laughed civilly at this piece of luck, 
and then they asked, civilly still, if Leigh Hunt had 
not done for a great many poets just what he was pro- 
posing to have done. What about the treatment of the 
poets and the quotations from them in the volumes on 
Wit and Humor, Imagination and Fancy, A Jar of 
Honey from Mount Hybla, and the rest? The talker 
owned that there was a great deal about these which 
was to his purpose, but, upon the whole, the criticism 
was too desultory and fragmentary, and the quotation 
was illustrative rather than representative, and so far 
it was illusory. He had a notion that Hunt's stories 
from the Italian poets were rather more in the line he 
would have followed, but he had not read these since 
he was a boy, and he was not prepared to answer for 
them. 

221 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

One of the company said that she had read those 
Italian poets in Leigh Hunt's version of them when 
she was a girl, and it had had the effect of making her 
think she had read the poets themselves, and she had 
not since read directly Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, or 
Tasso. She regarded that as an irreparable injury, 
and she doubted whether, if the great English poets 
could be introduced in that manner, very many 
people would pursue their acquaintance for them- 
selves. They would think they were familiar with 
them already. 

Yes, the talker assented, if that were the scheme, 
but it was not; or, at least, it was only part of the 
scheme. The scheme was to give the ever-increasing 
multitude of readers a chance to know something of 
the best literature. If they chose to pursue the ac- 
quaintance, very good; if they chose not to pursue the 
acquaintance, still very good ; they could not have made 
it at all without being somewhat refined and enlight- 
ened. He felt very much about it as he felt about 
seeing Europe, which some people left unseen because 
they could not give all the time to it they would like. 
He always said to such people, Go if they could only 
be gone a month. A day in Rome, or London, or Paris, 
was a treasure such as a lifetime at home could not 
lay up; an hour of Venice or Florence was precious; 
a moment of Milan or Verona, of Siena or Mantua, was 
beyond price. So you could not know a great poet so 
little as not to be enriched by him. A look from a 
beautiful woman, or a witty word from a wise one, 
distinguished and embellished the life into which it 
fell, so that it could never afterward be so common as 
it was before. 

Why, it was asked from a silence in which all the 

ladies tried to think whether the speaker had her in 

222 



THE ADVANTAGES OF CRITICISM 

mind or not, and whether he ought really to be so per- 
sonal, why could not Mr. Morley's English Men of 
Letters series be used to carry out the scheme proposed ; 
and its proposer said he had nothing to say against that, 
except perhaps that the frames might be too much for 
the pictures. He would rather choose a critical essay, 
as he had intimated, for the frame of each picture; in 
this sort of thing we had an endless choice, both new 
and old. If he had any preference it would be for the 
older-fashioned critics, like Hazlitt or perhaps like De 
Quincey; he was not sure, speaking without the book, 
whether De Quincey treated authors so much as topics, 
but he had the sense of wonderful things in him about 
the eighteenth - century poets : things that made you 
think you knew them, and that yet made you burn to 
be on the same intimate terms with them as De Quincey 
himself. 

His method of knowing the poets through the critics, 
the sympathetic critics, who were the only real critics, 
would have the advantage of acquainting the reader 
with the critics as well as the poets. The critics got a 
good deal of ingratitude from the reader generally, 
and perhaps in their character of mere reviewers they 
got no more than they merited, but in their friendly 
function of ushers to the good things, even the best 
things, in the authors they were studying, they had a 
claim upon him which he could not requite too gen- 
erously. They acted the part of real friends, and in 
the high company where the reader found himself 
strange and alone, they hospitably made him at home. 
Above all other kinds of writers, they made one feel 
that he was uttering the good things they said. Of 
course, for the young reader, there was the danger of 
his continuing always to think their thoughts in their 

terms, but there were also great chances that he would 

223 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

begin by-and-by to think his own thoughts in terms of 
his own. 

The more quotational the critics were, the better. 
For himself the speaker said that he liked that old 
custom of printing the very finest things in italics when 
it came to citing corroborative passages. It had not 
only the charm of the rococo, the pathos of a bygone 
fashion, but it was of the greatest use. No one is the 
worse for having a great beauty pointed out in the 
author one is reading or reading from. Sometimes one 
does not see the given beauty at first, and then he has 
the pleasure of puzzling it out ; sometimes he never sees 
it, and then his life is sublimed with an insoluble co- 
nundrum. Sometimes, still, he sees what the critic 
means, and disagrees with him. In this case he is not 
likely to go to the end of his journey without finding a 
critic whom he agrees with about the passage in 
question. 

After all, however, it was asked by one that had not 
spoken before (with that fine air of saying a novel 
thing which people put on who have not spoken be- 
fore), would not the superficial knowledge of the poets 
imparted by quotational criticism result in a sort of 
pseudo-culture which would be rather worse than noth- 
ing, a kind of intellectual plated ware or aesthetic near- 
silk ? 

The talker said he thought not, and that he had 

already touched upon some such point in what he had 

said about going to Europe for a few months. He 

offered the opinion that there was no such thing as 

pseudo-culture ; there was culture or there was not ; and 

the reader of a quotational criticism, if he enjoyed the 

quotations, became, so far, cultivated. It could not be 

said that he knew the poets treated of, but neither could 

it be said that he was quite ignorant of them. As a 

224 



THE ADVANTAGES OF CEITICISM 

matter of fact, lie did know them in a fashion, through 
a mind larger and clearer than his own. 

For this reason the talker favored the reading of 
criticism, especially the kind of criticism that quoted. 
He would even go so far as to say that there was no 
just and honest criticism without quotation. The critic 
was hound to make out his case, or else abdicate his 
function, and he could not make out his case, either for 
or against an author, without calling him to testify. 
Therefore, he was in favor of quotational criticism, for 
fairness' sake, as well as for his pleasure; and it was 
for the extension of it that he now contended. He 
was not sure that he wished to send the reader to the 
authors quoted in all cases. The reader could get 
through the passages cited a pretty good notion of 
the authors' quality, and as for their quantity, that 
was often made up of commonplaces or worse. In the 
case of the old poets, and most of the English classics, 
there was a great deal of filth which the reader would 
be better for not taking into his mind and which the 
most copiously quotational critics would hardly offer 
him. If any one said that without the filth one could 
not get a fair idea of those authors, he should be dis- 
posed to distinguish, and to say that without the filth 
one could not get a fair idea of their age, but of them- 
selves, yes. Their beauty and their greatness were per- 
sonal to them; even their dulness might be so; but 
their foulness was what had come off on them from 
living at periods when manners were foul. 



XXIII 
READING FOR A GRANDFATHER 

A young girl (much respected by the Easy Chair) 
who had always had the real good of her grandfather 
at heart, wished to make him a Christmas present be- 
fitting his years and agreeable to his tastes. She 
thought, only to dismiss them for their banality, of 
a box of the finest cigars, of a soft flannel dressing- 
gown, a bath robe of Turkish towelling embroidered by 
herself, of a velvet jacket, and of a pair of house shoes. 
She decided against some of these things because he did 
not smoke, because he never took off his walking coat 
and shoes till he went to bed, and because he had an old 
bath robe made him by her grandmother, very short 
and very scant (according to her notion at the chance 
moments when she had surprised him in it), from 
which neither love nor money could part him; the 
others she rejected for the reason already assigned. 
Little or nothing remained, then, but to give him books, 
and she was glad that she was forced to this conclusion 
because, when she reflected, she realized that his read- 
ing seemed to be very much neglected, or at least with- 
out any lift of imagination or any quality of modernity 
in it. As far as she had observed, he read the same old 
things over and over again, and did not know at all 
what was now going on in the great world of literature. 
She herself was a famous reader, and an authority 

226 



EEADIKG FOE A GKANDFATHEE 

about books with other girls, and with the young men 
who asked her across the afternoon tea-cups whether 
she had seen this or that new book, and scrabbled round, 
in choosing between cream and lemon, to hide the fact 
that they had not seen it themselves. She was there- 
fore exactly the person to select a little library of the 
latest reading for an old gentleman who was so behind 
the times as her grandfather; but before she plunged 
into the mad vortex of new publications she thought 
she would delicately find out his preferences, or if he 
had none, would try to inspire him with a curiosity 
concerning these or those new books. 

" Now, grandfather," she began, " you know I al- 
ways give you a Christmas present." 

" Yes, my dear," the old gentleman patiently as- 
sented, " I know you do. You are very thoughtful." 

" Not at all. If there is anything I hate, it is being 
thoughtful. What I like is being spontaneous." 

" Well, then, my dear, I don't mind saying you are 
very spontaneous." 

" And I detest surprises. If any one wishes to make 
a lasting enemy of me, let him surprise me. So I am 
going to tell you now what I am going to give you. Do 
you like that?" 

" I like everything you do, my child." 

" Well, this time you will like it better than ever. I 
am going to give you books. And in order not to dis- 
appoint you by giving you books that you have read 
before, I want to catechise you a little. Shall you 
mind it?" 

" Oh no, but I'm afraid you won't find me very 
frank." 

" I shall make you be. If you are not frank, there 
is no fun in not surprising you, or in not giving you 
books that you have read." 

227 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

" There is something in that," her grandfather as- 
sented. " But now, instead of finding out what I have 
read, or what I like, why not tell me what I ought to 
read and to like? I think I have seen a vast deal of 
advice to girls about their reading: why shouldn't the 
girls turn the tables and advise their elders? I often 
feel the need of advice from girls on all sorts of sub- 
jects, and you would find me very grateful, I believe." 

The girl's eyes sparkled and then softened toward 
this docile ancestor. " Do you really mean it, grand- 
father ? It would be fun if you did." 

" But I should want it to be serious, my dear. I 
should be glad if your good counsel could include the 
whole conduct of life, for I am sensible sometimes of 
a tendency to be silly and wicked, which I am sure you 
could help me to combat." 

" Oh, grandfather," said the girl, tenderly, " you 
know that isn't true!" 

" Well, admit for the sake of argument that it isn't. 
My difficulty in regard to reading remains, and there 
you certainly could help me. At moments it seems to 
me that I have come to the end of my line." 

The old gentleman's voice fell, and she could no 
longer suspect him of joking. So she began, " Why, 
what have you been reading last ?" 

" Well, my dear, I have been looking into the Spec- 
tator a little." 

" The London Spectator? Jim says they have it at 
the club, and he swears by it. But I mean, what books ; 
and that's a weekly newspaper, or a kind of review, 
isn't it?" 

" The Spectator I mean was a London newspaper, 
and it was a kind of review, but it was a daily. Is 
it possible that you've never heard of it ?" The young 
girl shook her head thoughtfully, regretfully, but upon 

228 



BEADING FOE A GKANDFATHEK 

the whole not anxiously; she was not afraid that any 
important thing in literature had escaped her. " But 
you've heard of Addison, and Steele, and Pope, and 
Swift?" 

" Oh jes f we had them at school, when we were read- 
ing Henry Esmond; they all came into that. And I 
remember, now : Colonel Esmond wrote a number of the 
Spectator for a surprise to Beatrix; but I thought it 
was all a make-up." 

" And you don't know about Sir Roger de Coverley ?" 

" Of course I do ! It's what the English call the 
Virginia Reel. But why do you ask? I thought we 
were talking about your reading. I don't see how you 
could get an old file of a daily newspaper, but if it 
amuses you! Is it so amusing?" 

" It's charming, but after one has read it as often 
as I have one begins to know it a little too well." 

" Yes ; and what else have you been reading ?" 

" Well, Leigh Hunt a little lately. He continues 
the old essayist tradition, and he is gentlv delight- 
ful." 

" Never heard of him !" the girl frankly declared. 

" He was a poet, too, and he wrote the Story of 
Rimini — about Paolo and Erancesca, you know." 

" Oh, there you're away off, grandfather ! Mr. 
Philips wrote about them; and that horrid D'Annunzio. 
Why, Duse gave D'Annunzio's play last winter ! What 
are you thinking of?" 

" Perhaps I am wandering a little," the grandfather 
meekly submitted, and the girl had to make him go on. 

" Do you read poetry a great deal ?" she asked, and 
she thought if his taste was mainly for poetry, it would 
simplify the difficulty of choosing the books for her 
present. 

" Well, I'm rather returning to it. I've been looking 
229 



IMAGINAKY INTEEVIEWS 

into Crabbe of late, and I have found him full of a 
quaint charm." 

" Crabbe ? I never neard of him t" she owned as 
boldly as before, for if he had been worth hearing of, 
she knew that she would have heard of him. " Don't 
you like Kipling V 9 

" Yes, when he is not noisy. I think I prefer Will- 
iam Watson among your very modern moderns." 

" Why, is lie living yet ? I thought he wrote ten or 
fifteen years ago! You don't call him modern! You 
like Stevenson, don't you ? He's a great stylist ; every- 
body says he is, and so is George Meredith. You must 
like him?" 

" He's a great intellect, but a little of him goes al- 
most as long a way as a little of Browning. I think 
I prefer Henry James." 

" Oh yes, he's just coming up. He's the one that 
has distinction. But the people who write like him are 
a great deal more popular. They have all his distinc- 
tion, and they don't tax your mind so much. But don't 
let's get off on novelists or there's no end to it. Who 
are really your favorite poets ?" 

" Well, I read Shakespeare rather often, and I read 
Dante by fits and starts; and I do not mind Milton 
from time to time. I like Wordsworth, and I like 
Keats a great deal better; every now and then I take 
up Cowper with pleasure, and I have found myself 
going back to Pope with real relish. And Byron ; yes, 
Byron! But I shouldn't advise your reading Don 
Juan." 

" That's an opera, isn't it ? What they call ' Don 
Giovanni.' I never heard of any such poem.' ; 

" That shows how careful you have been of your 

reading." 

" Oh, we read everything nowadays — if it's up to 
230 



HEADING FOR A GRANDFATHER 

date; and if Don Juan had been, you may be sure I 
would have heard of it. I suppose you like Ten- 
nyson, and Longfellow, and Emerson, and those old 
poets ?" 

" Are they old ? They used to be so new ! Yes, I 
like them, and I like Whittier and some things of 
Bryant's." 

At the last two names the girl looked vague, but she 
said : " Oh yes, I suppose so. And I suppose you like 
the old dramatists ?" 

" Some of them — Marlowe, and Beaumont and 
Fletcher: a few of their plays. But I can't stand 
most of the Elizabethans; I can't stand Ben Jonson 
at all." 

" Oh yes — i Rasselas.' I can't stand him either, 
grandfather. I'm quite with you about Ben Jonson. 
' Too much Johnson,' you know." 

The grandfather looked rather blank. " Too differ- 
ent Johnsons, I think, my dear. But perhaps you 
didn't mean the Elizabethans; perhaps you mean the 
dramatists of the other Johnson's time. Well, I like 
Sheridan pretty well, though his wit strikes me as 
mechanical, and I really prefer Goldsmith ; in his case, 
I prefer his Vicar of Wakefield, and his poems to 
his plays. Plays are not very easy reading, unless they 
are the very best. Shakespeare's are the only plays 
that one wants to read." 

The young girl held up her charming chin, with the 
air of keeping it above water too deep for her. " And 
Ibsen ?" she suggested. " I hope you despise Ibsen as 
much as I do. He's clear gone out now, thank good- 
ness ! Don't you think Ghosts was horrid ?" 

" It's dreadful, my dear ; but I shouldn't say it was 
horrid. No, I don't despise Ibsen; and I have found 
Mr. Pinero's plays good reading." 

231 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

" Oh," the girl said, getting her foot on the ground. 
" ' The Gay Lord Quex ' ; Miss Vanhrugh was great in 
that. But now don't get off on the theatre, grandfather, 
or there will he no end to it. Which of the old, old 
poets — before Burns or Shelley even — do you like?" 

" Well, when I was a boy, I read Chaucer, and liked 
him very much; and the other day when I was looking 
over Leigh Hunt's essays, I found a number of them 
about Chaucer with long, well-chosen extracts; and I 
don't know when I've found greater pleasure in poetry. 
If I must have a favorite among the old poets, I will 
take Chaucer. Of course, Spenser is rather more mod- 
ern." 

" Yes, but I can't bear his agnosticism, can you ? 
And I hate metaphysics, anyway." 

The grandfather looked bewildered; then he said, 
" Now, I'm afraid we are getting too much Spenser." 

The girl went off at a tangent. " Don't you just 
love Mr. Gillette in ' Sherlock Holmes ' ? There's a 
play I should think you would like to read! They 
say there's a novel been made out of it. I wish I could 
get hold of it for you. Well, go on, grandfather !" 

" No, my dear, it's for you to go on. But don't you 
think you've catechised me sufficiently about my read- 
ing? You must find it very old-fashioned." 

"No, not at all. I like old things myself. The 
girls are always laughing at me because I read George 
Eliot, and Dickens, and Thackeray, and Charles Beade, 
and Wilkie Collins, and those back numbers. But I 
should say, if I said anything, that you were rather 
deficient in fiction, grandfather. You seem to have 
read everything but novels." 

" Is that so ? I was afraid I had read nothing but 
novels. I — " 

" Tell me what novels you have read," she broke in 

232 



READING FOR A GRANDFATHER 

upon him imperatively. " The ones you consider the 
greatest." 

The grandfather had to think. " It is rather a long 
list — so long that I'm ashamed of it. Perhaps I'd 
better mention only the very greatest, like Don Quixote, 
and Gil Bias, and Wilhelm Meister, and The Vicar 
of Wakefield, and Clarissa Harlowe, and Emma, and 
Pride and Prejudice, and The Bride of Lammermoor, 
and I Promessi Sposi, and Belinda, and Frankenstein, 
and Chartreuse de Parme, and Cesar Birotteau, and 
The Last Days of Pompeii, and David Copperfield, 
and Pendennis, and The Scarlet Letter, and Blithedale 
Romance, and The Cloister and the Hearth, and Mid- 
dlemarch, and Smoke, and Fathers and Sons, and 
A Nest of Nobles, and War and Peace, and Anna 
Karenina, and Resurrection, and Dona Perfecta, and 
Marta y Maria, and I Malavoglia, and The Return 
of the Native, and UAssomoir, and Madame Bovary, 
and TTie Awkward Age, and TAe Grandissimes — and 
most of the other books of the same authors. Of course, 
I've read many more perhaps as great as these, that I 
can't think of at the moment." 

The young girl listened, in a vain effort to follow her 
agile ancestor in and out of the labyrinths of his fa- 
vorite fiction, most of which she did not recognize by 
the names he gave and some of which she believed to 
be very shocking, in a vague association of it with deep- 
ly moralized, denunciatory criticisms which she had 
read of the books or the authors. Upon the whole, she 
was rather pained by the confession which his read- 
ing formed for her grandfather, and she felt more than 
ever the necessity of undertaking his education, or at 
least his reform, in respect to it. She was glad now 
that she had decided to give him books for a Christmas 
present, for there was no time like Christmas for good 
16 233 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

resolutions, and if her grandfather was ever going to 
turn over a new leaf, this was the very hour to help him 
do it. 

She smiled very sweetly upon him, so as not to alarm 
him too much, and said she had never been so much 
interested as in knowing what hooks he really liked. 
But as he had read all those he named — 

" Oh, dozens of times I" he broke in. 

— Then perhaps he would leave it to her to choose an 
entirely new list for him, so that he could have some- 
thing freshly entertaining; she did not like to say 
more edifying for fear of hurting his feelings, and 
taking his silence for consent she went up and kissed 
him on his bald head and ran away to take the matter 
under immediate advisement. Her notion then was to 
look over several lists of the world's best hundred books 
which she had been keeping by her, but when she came 
to compare them, she found that they contained most 
of the books he had mentioned, besides many others. 
It would never do to give him any one of these libraries 
of the best hundred books for this reason, and for the 
reason that a hundred books would cost more of her 
grandfather's money than she felt justified in spending 
on him at a season when she had to make so many other 
presents. 

Just when she was at her wit's end, a sudden inspira- 
tion seized her. She pinned on her hat, and put on her 
new winter jacket, and went out and bought the last 
number of The Bookworm. At the end of this period- 
ical she had often got suggestions for her own read- 
ing, and she was sure that she should find there the 
means of helping her poor grandfather to a better taste 
in literature than he seemed to have. So she took the 
different letters from Chicago, San Francisco, Denver, 
Cincinnati, New Orleans, Cleveland, Buffalo, Boston, 

234 



BEADING FOE A GRANDFATHER 

Philadelphia, and up - town and clown - town in New 
York, giving the best-selling books of the month in all 
those places, and compiled an eclectic list from them, 
which she gave to her bookseller with orders to get them 
as nearly of the same sizes and colors as possible. He 
followed her instructions with a great deal of taste 
and allowed her twenty-five per cent, off, which she 
applied toward a wedding-present she would have to 
give shortly. In this way she was able to provide her 
grandfather for the new year with reading that every- 
body was talking about, and that brought him up to 
date with a round turn. 



XXIV 

SOME MOMENTS WITH THE MUSE 

Among the many letters which' the Easy Chair has 
received after its conference on the state of poetry, 
one of most decided note was from a writer con- 
fessing herself of the contrary - minded. " I love 
some children, but not childhood in general mere- 
ly because it is childhood. So I love some poems 
rather than poetry in general just because it is poetry. 
. . . I object to the tinkle. I object to the poetic 
license which performs a Germanic divorce between 
subject and verb, so that instead of a complete thought 
which can be mastered before another is set before the 
brain, there is a twist in the grammatical sequence 
that requires a conscious effort of will to keep the orig- 
inal thread. The world is too busy to do this ; reading 
must be a relaxation, not a study. . . . When poetry 
conforms in its mental tone to the spirit of the times; 
when it reflects the life and more or less the common 
thought of the day, then more of the common people 
will read it." 

There were other things in this letter which seemed 

to us of so much importance that we submitted it as a 

whole to a Woman's Club of our acquaintance. The 

nine ladies composing the club were not all literary, but 

they were all of aesthetic pursuits, and together they 

brought a good deal of culture to bear on the main 

236 



SOME MOMENTS WITH THE MUSE 

points of the letter. They were not quite of one mind, 
but they were so far agreed that what they had to say 
might be fairly regarded as a consensus of opinion. We 
will not attempt to report their remarks at any length — 
they ran to all lengths — but in offering a resume of 
what they variously said to a sole effect, we will do 
what we can to further the cause they joined in de- 
fending. 

The Muses — for we will no longer conceal that this 
Woman's Club was composed of the tuneful Xine — ac- 
knowledged that there was a great deal in what their 
contrary-minded sister said. They did not blame her 
one bit for the way she felt; they would have felt just 
so themselves in her place; but being as it were pro- 
fessionally dedicated to the beautiful in all its estab- 
lished forms, they thought themselves bound to direct 
her attention to one or two aspects of the case which 
she had apparently overlooked. They were only sorry 
that she was not there to take her own part; and they 
confessed, in her behalf, that it was ridiculous for 
poetry to turn the language upside down, and to take 
it apart and put it together wrong-end to, as it did. If 
anybody spoke the language so, or in prose wrote it so, 
they would certainly be a fool; but the Muses wished 
the sister to observe that every art existed by its con- 
vention, or by what in the moral world Ibsen would call 
its life-lie. If you looked at it from the colloquial 
standpoint, music was the absurdest thing in the world. 
In the orchestral part of an opera, for instance, there 
were more repetitions than in the scolding of the worst 
kind of shrew, and if you were to go about singing 
what you had to say, and singing it over and over, and 
stretching it out by runs and trills, or even expressing 
yourself in recitativo secco, it would simply set people 
wild. In painting it was worse, if anything: you had 

237 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

to make believe that things two inches high were life- 
size, and that there were relief and distance where 
there was nothing but a flat canvas, and that colors 
which were really like nothing in nature were natural. 
As for sculpture, it was too laughable for anything, 
whether you took it in bass-reliefs with persons stuck 
onto walls, half or three-quarters out, or in groups with 
people in eternal action; or in single figures, standing 
on one leg or holding out arms that would drop off if 
they were not supported by stone pegs ; or sitting down 
outdoors bareheaded where they would take their deaths 
of cold, or get sun-struck, or lay up rheumatism to 
beat the band, in the rain and snow and often without 
a stitch of clothes on. 

All this and more the Muses freely conceded to the 
position of the contrary-minded correspondent of the 
Easy Chair, and having behaved so handsomely, they 
felt justified in adding that her demand seemed to 
them perfectly preposterous. It was the very essence 
and office of poetry not to conform to " the mental tone 
and spirit of the times " ; and though it might very well 
reflect the life, it must not reflect " the common thought 
of the day " upon pain of vulgarizing and annulling 
itself. Poetry was static in its nature, and its busi- 
ness was the interpretation of enduring beauty and 
eternal veracity. If it stooped in submission to any 
such expectation as that expressed, and dedicated itself 
to the crude vaticination of the transitory emotions and 
opinions, it had better turn journalism at once. It had 
its law, and its law was distinction of ideal and ele- 
vation of tendency, no matter what material it dealt 
with. It might deal with the commonest, the cheapest 
material, but always in such a way as to dignify and 
beautify the material. 

Concerning the first point, that modern poetry was 

238 



SOME MOMENTS WITH THE MUSE 

wrong to indulge all those inversions, those transloca- 
tions, those ground and lofty syntactical tumblings 
which have mainly constituted poetic license, the ladies 
again relented, and allowed that there was much to say 
for what our correspondent said. In fact, they agreed, 
or agreed as nearly as nine ladies could, that it was 
perhaps time that poetry should, as it certainly might, 
write itself straightforwardly, with the verb in its true 
English place, and the adjective walking soberly before 
the noun; shunning those silly elisions like ne'er and 
o'er, and, above all, avoiding the weak and loathly 
omission of the definite article. Of the tinkle, by which 
they supposed the contrary - minded sister meant the 
rhyme, they said they could very well remember when 
there was no such thing in poetry; their native Greek 
had got on perfectly well without it, and even those 
poets at second-hand, the Romans. They observed that 
though Dante used it, Shakespeare did not, and Milton 
did not, in their greatest works ; and a good half of the 
time the first - rate moderns managed very well with 
blank verse. 

The Easy Chair did not like to dissent from these 
ladies, both because they were really great authorities 
and because it is always best to agree with ladies when 
you can. Besides, it would not have seemed quite the 
thing when they were inclining to this favorable view 
of their sister's contrary - mindedness, to take sides 
against her. In short, the Easy Chair reserved its 
misgivings for some such very intimate occasion as 
this, when it could impart them without wounding the 
susceptibilities of others, or risking a painful snub for 
itself. But it appeared to the Chair that the Muses 
did not go quite far enough in justifying the conven- 
tion, or the life-lie, by which poetry, as a form, existed. 
They could easily have proved that much of the mys- 

239 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

tical charm which differences poetry from prose resides 
in its license, its syntactical acrobatics, its affectations 
of diction, its elisions, its rhymes. As a man inverting 
his head and looking at the landscape between his legs 
gets an entirely new effect on the familiar prospect, so 
literature forsaking the wonted grammatical attitudes 
really achieves something richly strange by the novel 
and surprising postures permissible in verse. The 
phrases, the lines, the stanzas which the ear keeps 
lingering in its porches, loath to let them depart, are 
usually full of these licenses. They have a witchery 
which could be as little proved as denied; and when 
any poet proposes to forego them, and adhere rigidly 
to the law of prose in his rhythm, he practises a loyalty 
which is a sort of treason to his calling and will go 
far toward undoing him. 

While the ladies of that club were talking, some such 
thoughts as these were in our mind, suggested by sum- 
mer-long reading of a dear, delightful poet, altogether 
neglected in these days, who deserves to be known again 
wherever reality is prized or simplicity is loved. It is 
proof, indeed, how shallow was all the debate about 
realism and romanticism that the poetic tales of George 
Crabbe were never once alleged in witness of the charm 
which truth to condition and character has, in whatever 
form. But once, long before that ineffectual clamor 
arose, he was valued as he should be still. Edmund 
Burke was the first to understand his purpose and ap- 
preciate his work. He helped the poet not only with 
praises but with pounds till he could get upon his feet. 
He introduced Crabbe's verse to his great friends, 
to Doctor Johnson, who perceived at once that he 
would go far; to Sir Joshua Reynolds, who felt the 
brother-artist in him ; to the Lord Chancellor Thurlow, 

whose oaths were harder than his heart toward the fear- 

240 



SOME MOMENTS WITH THE MUSE 

lessly fearful young singer. The sympathy and ad- 
miration of the highest and the best followed him 
through his long life to his death. The great Mr. Fox 
loved him and his rhyme, and wished his tales to be 
read to him on the bed he never left alive. Earl Grey, 
Lord Holland, and the brilliant Canning wrote him 
letters of cordial acclaim; Walter Scott, the generous, 
the magnanimous, hailed him brother, and would al- 
ways have his books by him; none of his poems ap- 
peared without the warmest welcome, the most dis- 
criminating and applausive criticism from Jeffrey, the 
first critic of his long day. 

Crabbe had not only this exquisitely intelligent hear- 
ing, but he was accepted on his own terms, as a poet 
who saw so much beauty in simple and common life 
that he could not help painting it. He painted it in 
pieces of matchless fidelity to the fact, with nothing of 
flattery, but everything of charm in the likeness. His 
work is the enduring witness of persons, circumstances, 
customs, experiences utterly passed from the actual 
world, but recognizably true with every sincere reader. 
These tales of village life in England a hundred years 
ago are of an absolute directness and frankness. They 
blink nothing of the sordid, the mean, the vicious, the 
wicked in that life, from which they rarely rise in some 
glimpse of the state of the neighboring gentry, and yet 
they abound in beauty that consoles and encourages. 
They are full of keen analysis, sly wit, kindly humor, 
and of a satire too conscientious to bear the name; of 
pathos, of compassion, of reverence, while in unaffected 
singleness of ideal they are unsurpassed. 

Will our contrary-minded correspondent believe that 

these studies, these finished pictures, which so perfectly 

" reflect the common life ... of the day," are full of 

the license, the tinkle, the German divorce of verb and 

241 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

subject, the twisted grammatical sequence which her 
soul abhors in verse ? Crabbe chose for his vehicle the 
heroic couplet in which English poetry had jog-trotted 
ever since the time of Pope, as it often had before; 
and he made it go as like Pope's couplet as he could, 
with the same caesura, the same antithetical balance, the 
same feats of rhetoric, the same inversions, and the 
same closes of the sense in each couplet. The most 
artificial and the most natural poets were at one in their 
literary convention. Yet such was the freshness of 
Crabbe's impulse, such his divine authority to deal 
with material unemployed in English poetry before, 
that you forget all the affectations of the outward con- 
vention, or remember them only for a pleasure in the 
quaintness of their use for his purposes. How im- 
perishable, anyway, is the interest of things important 
to the spirit, the fancy, and how largely does this inter- 
est lie in the freshness of the mind bringing itself to 
the things, how little in the novelty of the things! 
The demand for strangeness in the things them- 
selves is the demand of the sophisticated mind: the 
mind which has lost its simplicity in the process of 
continuing unenlightened. It is this demand which be- 
trays the mediocre mind of the Anglo-Saxon race, the 
sophistication of the English mind, and the obfuscation 
(which is sophistication at second-hand) of the Amer- 
ican mind. The non-imaginative person is nowhere so 
much at home as in a voluntary exile ; and this may be 
why it was sometime said that travel is the fool's para- 
dise. Eor such a person to realize anything the terms 
are that he shall go abroad, either into an alien scene 
or into a period of the past ; then he can begin to have 
some pleasure. He must first of all get away from 
himself, and he is not to be blamed for that; any one 
else would wish to get away from him. His exaction is 

242 



SOME MOMENTS WITH THE MUSE 

not a test of merit; it is merely the clew to a psycho- 
logical situation which is neither so novel nor so im- 
portant as to require of our hard-worked civilization the 
production of an order of more inspired criticism than 
it has worried along with hitherto. 



XXV 

A NORMAL HERO AND HEROINE OUT OF WORK 

They sat together on a bench in the Park, far enough 
apart to distinguish themselves from the many other 
pairs who were but too obviously lovers. It could not 
be said quite that these two were actually lovers; but 
there was an air of passionate provisionality over and 
around them, a light such as in springtime seems to 
enfold the tree before it takes the positive color of bud 
or blossom ; and, with an eye for literary material that 
had rarely failed him, he of the Easy Chair perceived 
that they were a hero and heroine of a kind which he 
instantly felt it a great pity he should not have met 
oftener in fiction of late. As he looked at them he was 
more and more penetrated by a delicate pathos in the 
fact that, such as he saw them, they belonged in their 
fine sort to the great host of the Unemployed. No one 
else might have seen it, but he saw, with that inner eye 
of his, which compassion suffused but did not obscure, 
that they were out of a job, and he was not surprised 
when he heard the young girl fetch a muted sigh and 
then say : " No, they don't want us any more. I don't 
understand why; it is very strange; but it is perfectly 
certain." 

" Yes, there's no doubt of that," the young man re- 
turned, in a despair tinged with resentment. 

She was very pretty and he was handsome, and they 
244 



A NORMAL HERO AND HEROINE 

were both tastefully dressed, with a due deference to 
fashion, yet with a personal qualification of the cut 
and color of their clothes which, if it promised more 
than it could fulfil in some ways, implied a modest self- 
respect, better than the arrogance of great social suc- 
cess or worldly splendor. She could have been the only 
daughter of a widowed father in moderate circum- 
stances; or an orphan brought up by a careful aunt, 
or a duteous sister in a large family of girls, with whom 
she shared the shelter of a wisely ordered, if somewhat 
crowded, home ; or she could have been a serious student 
of any of the various arts and sciences which girls study 
now in an independence compatible with true beauty of 
behavior. He might have been a young lawyer or doc- 
tor or business man; or a painter or architect; or a 
professor in some college or a minister in charge of his 
first parish. What struck the observer in them and 
pleased him was that they seemed of that finer Amer- 
ican average which is the best, and, rightly seen, 
the most interesting phase of civilized life yet 
known. 

" I sometimes think," the girl resumed, in the silence 
of her companion, " that I made a mistake in my 
origin or my early education. It's a great disadvan- 
tage, in fiction nowadays, for a girl to speak gram- 
matically, as I always do, without any trace of accent 
or dialect. Of course, if I had been high-born or low- 
born in the olden times, somewhere or other, I shouldn't 
have to be looking for a place now; or if I had been 
unhappily married, or divorced, or merely separated 
from my husband, the story-writers would have had 
some use for me. But I have tried always to be good 
and nice and ladylike, and I haven't been in a short 
story for ages." 

" Is it so bad as that V 9 the young man asked, sadly. 

245 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

" Quite. If I could only have had something askew 
in my heredity, I know lots of authoresses who would 
have jumped at me. I can't do anything wildly ad- 
venturous in the Middle Ages or the Revolutionary 
period, because I'm so afraid; but I know that in the 
course of modern life I've always been fairly equal to 
emergencies, and I don't believe that I should fail in 
case of trouble, or that if it came to poverty I should 
be ashamed to share the deprivations that fell to my 
lot. I don't think I'm very selfish ; I would be willing 
to stay in town all summer if an author wanted me, 
and I know I could make it interesting for his readers. 
I could marry an English nobleman if it was really 
necessary, and, if I didn't like to live in England be- 
cause I was fond of my own country, I believe I could 
get him to stay here half the time with me; and that 
would appeal to a large class. I don't know whether I 
would care to be rescued a great deal ; it would depend 
upon what it was from. But I could stand a great 
deal of pain if need be, and I hope that if it came to 
anything like right or wrong I should act conscientious- 
ly. In society, I shouldn't mind any amount of dancing 
or dining or teaing, and I should be willing to take 
my part in the lighter athletics. But," she ended, as 
she began, with a sigh, " I'm not wanted." 

" Yes, I see what you mean," the young man said, 
with a thoughtful knot between his brows. " I'm not 
wanted myself, at present, in the short stories; but in 
the last dozen or so where I had an engagement I cer- 
tainly didn't meet you ; and it is pleasant to be paired 
off in a story with a heroine who has the instincts and 
habits of a lady. Of course, a hero is only something 
in an author's fancy, and I've no right to be exacting; 
but it does go cgainst me to love a girl who ropes cat- 
tle, or a woman who has a past, or a husband, or some- 

246 



A NOEMAL HERO AND HEROINE 

thing of the kind. I always do my best for the author, 
but I can't forget that I'm a gentleman, and it's dif- 
ficult to win a heroine when the very idea of her makes 
you shudder. I sometimes wonder how the authors 
would like it themselves if they had to do what they 
expect of us in that way. They're generally very 
decent fellows, good husbands and fathers, who have 
married lady - like girls and wouldn't think of asso- 
ciating with a shady or ignorant person." 

" The authoresses are quite as inconsistent," the pro- 
fessional heroine rejoined. " They wouldn't speak to 
the kind of young men whom they expect a heroine to 
be passionately in love with. They must know how 
very oddly a girl feels about people who are outside of 
the world she's been brought up in. It isn't enough that 
a man should be very noble at heart and do grand 
things, or save your life every now and then, or be 
masterful and use his giant will to make you in love 
with him. I don't see why they can't let one have, now 
and then, the kind of husbands they get for themselves. 
For my part, I should like always to give my heart to 
a normal, sensible, well-bred, conscientious, agreeable 
man who could offer me a pleasant home — I wouldn't 
mind the suburbs; and I could work with him and 
work for him till I dropped — the kind of man that the 
real world seems to be so full of. I've never had a 
fair chance to show what was in me; I've always been 
placed in such a false petition. Now I have no position 
at all, not even a false one !" 

Her companion was silent for a while. Then he 
said : " Yes, they all seem, authors and authoresses both, 
to lose sight of the fact that the constitution of our so- 
ciety is more picturesque, more dramatic, more poetical 
than any in the world. We can have the play of all the 
passions and emotions in ordinary, innocent love-mak- 

247 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

ing that other peoples can have only on the worst 
conditions; and yet the story-writers won't avail them- 
selves of the beauty that lies next to their hands. They 
go abroad for impossible circumstances, or they want to 
bewitch ours with the chemistry of all sorts of eccentric 
characters, exaggerated incentives, morbid propensities, 
pathological conditions, or diseased psychology. As I 
said before, I know I'm only a creature of the story- 
teller's fancy, and a creature out of work at that; but 
I believe I was imagined in a good moment — I'm sure 
you were — and I should like an engagement in an hon- 
est, wholesome situation. I think I could do creditable 
work in it." 

" I know you could," the heroine rejoined, fervently, 
almost tenderly, so that it seemed to the listener there 
was an involuntary rapprochement of their shadowy 
substances on the bench where they floated in a sitting 
posture. " I don't want to be greedy ; I believe in liv- 
ing and letting live. I think the abnormal has just as 
good a right to be in the stories as the normal ; but why 
shut the normal out altogether ? What I should like 
to ask the short-story writers is whether they and their 
readers are so bored with themselves and the people 
they know in the real world that they have no use for 
anything like its average in their fiction. It's impos- 
sible for us to change — " 

" I shouldn't wish you to change," the hero said, so 
fondly that the witness trembled for something more 
demonstrative. 

" Thank you ! But what I mean is, couldn't they 
change a little? Couldn't they give us another trial? 
They've been using the abnormal, in some shape or 
other, so long that I should think they would find a 
hero and heroine who simply fell in love at a dance or 
a dinner, or in a house-party or at a picnic, and worked 

248 



A NOEMAL HERO AND HEROINE 

out their characters to each other, through the natural 
worry and difficulty, and pleasure and happiness, till 
they got married — a relief from, well, the other thing. 
I'm sure if they offered me the chance, I could make 
myself attractive to their readers, and I believe I should 
have the charm of novelty." 

" You would have more than the charm of novelty," 
the hero said, and the witness trembled again for the 
convenances which one so often sees offended on the 
benches in the Park. But then he remembered that 
these young people were avowedly nice, and that they 
were morally incapable of misbehavior. " And for a 
time, at least, I believe you — I believe we, for I must 
necessarily be engaged with you — would succeed. The 
difficulty would be to get the notion of our employment 
to the authors." It was on the listener's tongue to say 
that he thought he could manage that, when the hero 
arrested him with the sad misgiving, " But they would 
say we were commonplace, and that would kill the 
chance of our ever having a run." 

A tremendous longing filled the witness, a potent de- 
sire to rescue this engaging pair from the dismay into 
which they fell at the fatal word. " !No, no !" he con- 
jured them. " Not commonplace. A judicious para- 
graph anticipative of your reappearance could be ar- 
ranged, in which you could be hailed as the normal 
hero and heroine, and greeted as a grateful relief from 
the hackneyed freaks and deformities of the prevalent 
short story, or the impassioned paper-doll pattern of the 
mediaeval men and maidens, or the spotted and battered 
figures of the studies in morbid analysis which pass for 
fiction in the magazines. We must get that luminous 
word normal before the reading public at once, and you 
will be rightly seen in its benign ray and recognized 
from the start — yes ! in advance of the start — for what 
17 249 



IMAGINAKY INTEKVIEWS 

you are : types of the loveliness of our average life, the 
fairest blossoms of that faith in human nature which 
has flourished here into the most beautiful and glorious 
civilization of all times. With us the average life is 
enchanting, the normal is the exquisite. Have patience, 
have courage ; your time is coming again !" 

It seemed to him that the gentle shapes wavered 
in his vehement breath, and he could not realize that in 
their alien realm they could not have heard a word he 
uttered. They remained dreamily silent, as if he had 
not spoken, and then the heroine said : " Perhaps we 
shall have to wait for a new school of short - story 
writers before we can get back into the magazines. 
Some beginner must see in us what has always pleased : 
the likeness to himself or herself, the truth to nature, 
the loyalty to the American ideal of happiness. He 
will find that we easily and probably end well, and that 
we're a consolation and refuge for readers, who can 
take heart from our happy denouements, when they 
see a family resemblance in us, and can reasonably 
hope that if they follow our examples they will share 
our blessings. Authors can't really enjoy themselves 
in the company of those degenerates, as I call them. 
They're mostly as young and right-principled and well- 
behaved as ourselves, and, if they could get to know us, 
we should be the best of friends. They would real- 
ize that there was plenty of harmless fun, as well as 
love, in the world, and that there was lots of good- 
luck." 

" Like ours, now, with no work and no prospect of 
it?" he returned, in his refusal to be persuaded, yet 
ready to be comforted. 

Having set out on that road, she would not turn 
back ; she persisted, like any woman who is contraried, 
no matter how far she ends from her first position: 

250 



A NOEMAL HEKO AND HEEOINE 

" Yes, like ours now. For this is probably the dark 
hour before the dawn. We must wait." 

" And perish in the mean time ?" 

" Oh, we shall not perish," she responded, heroinical- 
ly. " It's not for nothing that we are immortal," and 
as she spoke she passed her translucent hand through 
his arm, and, rising, they drifted off together and left 
the emissary of the Easy Chair watching them till they 
mixed with the mists under the trees in the perspective 
of the Mall. 



OTHER ESSAYS 



AUTUMN IN THE COUNTRY AND CITY 

In the morning the trees stood perfectly still : yellow, 
yellowish-green, crimson, russet. Not a pulse of air 
stirred their stricken foliage, but the leaves left the 
spray and dripped silently, vertically down, with a 
faint, ticking sound. They fell like the tears of a 
grief which is too inward for any other outward sign; 
an absent grief, almost self-forgetful. By-and-by, soft- 
ly, very softly, as Nature does things when she emulates 
the best Art and shuns the showiness and noisiness of 
the second-best, the wind crept in from the leaden sea, 
which turned iron under it, corrugated iron. Then the 
trees began to bend, and writhe, and sigh, and moan ; 
and their leaves flew through the air, and blew and scut- 
tled over the grass, and in an hour all the boughs were 
bare. The summer, which had been living till then and 
dying, was now dead. 

That was the reason why certain people who had been 

living with it, and seemed dying in it, were now in a 

manner dead with it, so that their ghosts were glad to 

get back to town, where the ghosts of thousands and 

hundreds of thousands of others were hustling in the 

streets and the trolleys and subways and elevateds, and 

shops and factories and offices, and making believe to be 

much more alive than they were in the country. Yet 

the town, the haunt of those harassed and hurried 

255 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

spectres, who are not without their illusory hilarity, 
their phantasmal happiness, has a charm which we of 
the Easy Chair always feel, on first returning to it in 
the autumn, and which the representative of the fam- 
ily we are imagining finds rather an impassioned pleas- 
ure in. He came on to N~ew York, while the others 
lingered in a dim Bostonian limbo, and he amused him- 
self very well, in a shadowy sort, looking at those other 
shades who had arrived in like sort, or different, and 
were there together with him in those fine days just 
preceding the election; after which the season broke in 
tears again, and the autumn advanced another step 
toward winter. 

There is no moment of the Kew York year which is 
more characteristic of it than that mid-autumnal mo- 
ment, which the summer and the winter are equally 
far from. Mid-May is very well, and the weather then 
is perfect, but that is a moment pierced with the un- 
rest of going or getting ready to go away. The call 
of the eld in Europe, or the call of the wild in New- 
port, has already depopulated our streets of what is 
richest and naturally best in our city life; the shops, 
indeed, show a fevered activity in the near-richest and 
e ear-best who are providing for their summer wants at 
mountain or sea-shore ; but the theatres are closing like 
fading flowers, and shedding their chorus-girls on every 
outward breeze; the tables d'hote express a relaxed en- 
terprise in the nonchalance of the management and 
service; the hotels yawn wearily from their hollow 
rooms; the greengroceries try to mask the barrenness 
of their windows in a show of tropic or semi-tropic 
fruits; the provision-men merely disgust with their re- 
tarded displays of butcher's meats and poultry. 

But with what a difference the mid-autumn of the 
town welcomes its returners! Ghosts, we have called 

25Q 



BROADWAY AT NIGHT 



AUTUMN IN COUNTKY AND CITY 

them, mainly to humor a figure we began with, but 
they are ghosts rather in the meaning of revenants, 
which is a good meaning enough. They must be a 
very aged or very stupid sort of revenants if their 
palingenetic substance does not thrill at the first night- 
ly vision of Broadway, of that fairy flare of electric 
lights, advertising whiskeys and actresses and beers, and 
luring the beholder into a hundred hotels and theatres 
and restaurants. It is now past the hour of roof-gardens 
with their songs and dances, but the vaudeville is in 
full bloom, and the play-houses are blossoming in the 
bills of their new comedies and operas and burlesques. 
The pavements are filled, but not yet crowded, with 
people going to dinner at the tables d'hote; the shop 
windows glitter and shine, and promise a delight for 
the morrow which the morrow may or may not realize. 
But as yet the town is not replete to choking, as it 
will be later, when those who fancy they constitute the 
town have got back to it from their Europes, their New- 
ports, their Bar Harbors, their Lenoxes, their Tuxedos, 
weary of scorning delights and living laborious days in 
that round of intellectual and moral events duly cele- 
brated in the society news of the Sunday papers. Fifth 
Avenue abounds in automobiles but does not yet super- 
abound; you do not quite take your life in your hand 
in crossing the street at those corners where there is 
no policeman's hand to put it in. Everywhere are cars, 
carts, carriages ; and the motorist whirs through the in- 
tersecting streets and round the corners, bent on suicide 
or homicide, and the kind old trolleys and hansoms that 
once seemed so threatening have almost become so many 
arks of safety from the furious machines replacing 
them. But a few short years ago the passer on the 
Avenue could pride himself on a count of twenty auto- 
mobiles in his walk from Murray Hill to the Plaza ; 

257 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

now he can easily number hundreds, without an emo- 
tion of self-approval. 

But their abundance is only provisional, a mere fore- 
cast of the superabundance to come. All things are 
provisional, all sights, all sounds, and this forms the 
peculiar charm of the hour, its haunting and winning 
charm. If you take the omnibus - top to be trundled 
whiningly up to one of the farther east-side entrances 
of the Park, and then dismount and walk back to the 
Plaza through it, you are even more keenly aware of 
the suspensive quality of the time. The summer, which 
you left for dead by mountain or sea-shore, stirs with 
lingering consciousness in the bland air of the great 
pleasance. Many leaves are yet green on the trees, 
and where they are not green and not there they are 
gay on the grass under the trees. There are birds, not, 
to be sure, singing, but cheerfully chirping; and there 
are occasional blazons of courageous flowers ; the benches 
beside the walks, which the northern blasts will soon 
sweep bare, are still kept by the lovers and loafers who 
have frequented them ever since the spring, and by the 
nurses, who cumber the footway before them with their 
perambulators. The fat squirrels waddle over the as- 
phalt, and cock the impudent eye of the sturdy beggar 
at the passer whom they suspect of latent peanuts; it 
is high carnival of the children with hoops and balls; 
it is the supreme moment of the saddle-donkeys in the 
by-paths, and the carriage-goats in the Mall, and of 
the rowboats on the ponds, which presently will be with- 
drawn for their secret hibernation, where no man can 
find them out. When the first snow flies, even while 
it is yet poising for flight in the dim pits of air, all 
these delights will have vanished, and the winter, which 
will claim the city for its own through a good four 
months, will be upon it. 

258 



AUTUMN IN COUNTKY AND CITY 

Always come back, therefore, if you must come at 
all, about the beginning of November, and if you can 
manage to take in Election Day, and especially Election 
Night, it will not be a bad notion. New York has five 
saturnalia every year: New Year's Night, Decoration 
Day, Fourth of July, Election Night, and Thanksgiv- 
ing, and not the least of these is Election Night. If it 
is a right first Tuesday of November, the daytime 
wind will be veering from west to south and back, sun 
and cloud will equally share the hours between them, 
and a not unnatural quiet, as of political passions 
hushed under the blanket of the Australian ballot, will 
prevail. The streets will be rather emptied than filled, 
and the litter of straw and scrap-paper, and the ordure 
and other filth of the great slattern town, will blow 
agreeably about under your feet and into your eyes and 
teeth. But with the falling of the night there will be 
a rise of the urban spirits; the sidewalks will thicken 
with citizens of all ages and sexes and nations; and if 
you will then seek some large centre for the cinemato- 
graphic dissemination of the election news, you will 
find yourself one of a multitude gloating on the scenes 
of comedy and tragedy thrown up on the canvas to stay 
your impatience for the returns. Along the curbstones 
are stationed wagons for the sale of the wind and string 
instruments, whose raw, harsh discords of whistling and 
twanging will begin with the sight of the vote from the 
first precinct. Meantime policemen, nervously fondling 
their clubs in their hands, hang upon the fringes of the 
crowd, which is yet so good-natured that it seems to 
have no impulse but to lift children on its shoulders 
and put pretty girls before it, and caress old women 
and cripples into favorable positions, so that they may 
see better. You will wish to leave it before the club- 
bing begins, and either go home to the slumbers which 

259 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

the whistling and twanging will duly attend; or join 
the diners going into or coming out of the restaurants, 
or the throngs strolling down into the fairy realms of 
Broadway, under the flare of the whiskeys and the ac- 
tresses. 

At such a time it is best to be young, but it is not so 
very bad to be old, for the charm of the hour, the air, 
and the place is such that even the heart of age must 
rise a little at it. What the night may really be, if it 
is not positively raining, you " do not know or need to 
know." Those soft lamps overhead, which might alike 
seem let garlanding down from the vault above or 
flowering up from the gulfs below out of a still greater 
pyrotechnic richness, supply the defect, if there is any, 
of moon and stars. Only the air is actual, the air of the 
New York night, which is as different from that of the 
London night as from that of the Paris night, or, for 
all we know, the St. Petersburg night. At times we 
have fancied in its early autumnal tones something 
Florentine, something Venetian, but, after all, it is 
not quite either, even when the tones of these are crud- 
est. It is the subtlest, the most penetrating expression 
of the New York temperament; but what that is, who 
shall say? That mystic air is haunted little from the 
past, for properly speaking there never was a city so 
unhistorical in temperament. A record of civic cor- 
ruption, running back to the first servants of the Dutch 
Companies, does not constitute municipal history, and 
our part in national events from the time we felt the 
stirrings of national consciousness has not been glorious, 
as these have not been impressive. Of New York's 
present at any given moment you wish to say in her 
patient-impatient slang, " Forget it, forget it." There 
remains only the future from which she can derive that 
temperamental effect in her night air ; but, again, what 

260 




ELECTION-NIGHT CROWDS 



AUTUMN IN COUNTEY AND CITY 

that is, who shall say ? If any one were so daring, he 
might say it was confidence modified by anxiety ; a rash 
expectation of luck derived from immunity for past 
transgression; the hopes of youth shot with youth's 
despairs : not sweet, innocent youth, but youth knowing 
and experienced, though not unwilling to shun evil be- 
cause of the bad morrow it sometimes brings. No other 
city under the sun, we doubt, is so expressive of that 
youth : that modern youth, able, agile, eager, audacious ; 
not the youth of the poets, but the youth of the true, the 
grim realists. 

Something, a faint, faint consciousness of this, visits 
even the sad heart of age on any New York night when 
it is not raining too hard, and one thinks only of get- 
ting indoors, where all nights are alike. But mostly 
it comes when the autumn is dreaming toward winter 
in that interlude of the seasons which we call Indian 
Summer. It is a stretch of time which we have hand- 
somely bestowed upon our aborigines, in compensation 
for the four seasons we have taken from them, like some 
of those Reservations which we have left them in lieu 
of the immeasurable lands we have alienated. It used 
to be longer than it is now ; it used to be several weeks 
long; in the sense of childhood, it was almost months. 
It is still qualitatively the same, and it is more than 
any other time expressive of the New York tempera- 
ment, perhaps because we have honored in the civic 
ideal the polity of our Indian predecessors, and in 
Tammany and its recurrently triumphant braves, have 
kept their memory green. But if this is not so, the 
spiritual fact remains, and under the sky of the Election 
Night you feel New York as you do in no other hour. 
The sense extends through the other autumn nights till 
that night, sure to come, when the pensive weather 
breaks in tears, and the next day it rains and rains, and 

2fil 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

the streets stream with the flood, and the dull air reeks 
with a sort of inner steam, hot, close, and sticky as a 
brother: a brother whose wants are many and whose 
resources are few. The morning after the storm, there 
will be a keen thrill in the air, keen but wholesome and 
bracing as a good resolution and not necessarily more 
lasting. The asphalt has been washed as clean as a 
renovated conscience, and the city presses forward again 
to the future in which alone it has its being, with the 
gay confidence of a sinner who has forgiven himself 
his sins and is no longer sorry for them. 

After that interlude, when the streets of the Ad- 
vanced Vaudeville, which we know as New York, begin 
again and continue till the Chasers come in late May, 
there will be many other sorts of weather, but none so 
characteristic of her. There will be the sort of weather 
toward the end of January, when really it seems as if 
nothing else could console him for the intolerable freez- 
ing and thawing, the snow upon snow, the rain upon 
rain, the winds that soak him and the winds that shrivel 
him, and the suns that mock him from a subtropic sky 
through subarctic air. We foresee him then settling 
into his arm-chair, while the wind whistles as naturally 
as the wind in the theatre around the angles of his lofty 
flat, and drives the snow of the shredded paper through 
the air or beats it in soft clots against the pane. He 
turns our page, and as he catches our vague drift, before 
yielding himself wholly to its allure, he questions, as 
readers like to do, whether the writer is altogether right 
in his contention that the mid-autumnal moment is the 
most characteristic moment of the New York year. Is 
not the mid-winter moment yet more characteristic? 
lie conjures up, in the rich content of his indoor re- 
moteness, the vision of the vile street below his flat, 
banked high with the garnered heaps of filthy snow, 

262 



AUTUMN IN COUNTRY AND CITY 

which alternately freeze and thaw, which the rain does 
not wash nor the wind blow away, and which the 
shredded - paper flakes are now drifting higher. Tie 
sees the foot-passers struggling under their umbrellas 
toward the avenues where the reluctant trolleys pause 
jarringly for them, and the elevated trains roar along 
the trestle overhead; where the saloon winks a wicked 
eye on every corner; where the signs of the whiskeys 
and actresses flare through the thickened night; and 
the cab tilts and rocks across the trolley rails, and the 
crowds of hotel-sojourners seek the shelter of the the- 
atres, and all is bleak and wet and squalid. In more 
respectful vision he beholds the darkened mansions of 
the richest and best, who have already fled the scene 
of their brief winter revel and are forcing the spring 
in their Floridas, their Egypts, their Kivieras. He 
himself remains midway between the last fall and the 
next spring; and perhaps he decides against the writer, 
as the perverse reader sometimes will, and holds that 
this hour of suspense and misgiving is the supreme, the 
duodecimal hour of the metropolitan dial. He may be 
right ; who knows ? New York's hours are all charac- 
teristic; and the hour whose mystical quality we have 
been trying to intimate is already past, and we must 
wait another year before we can put it to the test again ; 
wait till the trees once more stand perfectly still: yel- 
low, yellowish - green, crimson, russet, and the wind 
comes up and blows them bare, and yet another summer 
is dead, and the mourners, the ghosts, the revenants 
have once more returned to town. 



II 

PERSONAL AND EPISTOLARY ADDRESSES 

A constant reader of the Easy Chair has come to 
it with a difficulty which, at the generous Christmas- 
tide, we hope his fellow-readers will join us in helping 
solve : they may, if they like, regard it as a merry jest 
of the patron saint of the day, a sort of riddle thrown 
upon the table at the general feast for each to try his 
wits upon 

"Across the walnuts and the wine." 

" How," this puzzled spirit has asked, " shall I ad- 
dress a friend of mine who, besides being a person of 
civil condition, with a right to the respect that we like 
to show people of standing in directing our letters to 
them, has the distinction of being a doctor of phi- 
losophy, of letters, and of laws by the vote of several 
great universities ? Shall I greet him as, say, Smythe 
Johnes, Esq., or Dr. Smythe Johnes, or Smythe Johnes, 
Ph.D., Litt.D., LL.D., or simply Mr. Smythe Johnes ?" 

Decidedly, we should answer, to begin with, not " Mr. 
Smythe Johnes " if you wish to keep the finest bloom 
on your friendship with any man who knows the world. 
He will much prefer being addressed simply " Smythe 
Johnes," with his street and number, for he feels him- 
self classed by your " Mr. Smythe Johnes " with all 
those Mr. Smythe Johneses whom he loves and honors 

264 



EPISTOLAKY ADDRESSES 

in their quality of tradesmen and working-men, but 
does not hold of quite the same social rank as himself. 
After our revolt in essentials from the English in the 
eighteenth century, we are now conforming more and 
more in the twentieth to their usages in non-essentials, 
and the English always write Smythe Johnes, Esq., 
or Dr. Smythe Johnes or the like, unless Mr. Smythe 
Johnes is in trade or below it. They, indeed, some- 
times carry their scruple so far that they will address 
him as Mr. Smythe Johnes at his place of business, and 
Smythe Johnes, Esq., at his private residence. 

The English, who like their taffy thick and slab, and 
who, if one of them happens to be the Earl of Tolloller, 
are not richly enough satisfied to be so accosted by let- 
ter, but exact some such address as The Eight Honorable 
the Earl of Tolloller, all like distinctions in their taffy, 
and are offended if you give them a commoner sort 
than they think their due. But the Americans, who 
pretend to a manlier self-respect, had once pretty gen- 
erally decided upon Mr. Smythe Johnes as the right di- 
rection for his letters. They argued that Esquire was 
the proper address for lawyers, apparently because law- 
yers are so commonly called Squire in the simpler 
life. In the disuse of the older form of Armiger they 
forgot that inter arma silent leges, and that Esquire 
was logically as unfit for lawyers as for civil doctors, 
divines, or mediciners. He of the Easy Chair, when 
an editor long ago, yielded to the prevalent American 
misrendering for a time, and indiscriminately addressed 
all his contributors as " Mr." One of them, the most 
liberal of them in principle, bore the ignominy for 
about a year, and then he protested. After that the 
young editor (he was then almost as young as any one 
now writing deathless fiction) indiscriminately ad- 
dressed his contributors as Esq. Yet he had an abid- 
18 205 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

ing sense of the absurdity in directing letters to John 
G. Whittier, Esq., for if the poet was truly a Eriend 
and an abhorrer of Avar, he could not be hailed Armiger 
without something like insult. 

With doctors of divinity the question is not so vex- 
ing or vexed ; but it is said that of late a lion is rising 
in the way of rightly addressing doctors of medicine. 
If you wish to be attended by a physician who pays 
all visits after nightfall in evening dress, it is said 
that you are now to write Smythe Johnes, M.D., Esq., 
and not Dr. Smythe Johnes, as formerly. In Eng- 
land, the source of all our ceremonial woes, you can- 
not call a surgeon " doctor " without offence ; he is 
Mr. Smythe Johnes when spoken to, but whether 
he is Mr. Smythe Johnes through the post, Heaven 
knows. 

It is a thousand pities that when we cut ourselves 
off from that troubled source politically, we did not 
dam it up in all the things of etiquette. We indeed 
struck for freedom and sense at the very highest point, 
and began at once to write George Washington, Presi- 
dent, as we still write William H. Taft, President. 
The Chief Magistrate is offered no taffy in our nation, 
or perhaps the word President is held to be taffy enough 
and to spare; for only the Governor of Massachusetts 
is legally even so much as Excellency. Yet by usage 
you are expected to address all ambassadors and min- 
isters as Excellencies, and all persons in public office 
from members of Congress and of the Cabinet down to 
the lowest legislative or judicial functionaries as Hon- 
orables. This simplifies the task of directing envelopes 
to them, and, if a man once holds military rank in any 
peace establishment, he makes life a little easier for his 
correspondents by remaining General, or Captain, or 

Admiral, or Commander. You cannot Mister him, and 

266 



EPISTOLAKY ADDRESSES 

you cannot Esquire him, and there is, therefore, no 
question as to what you shall superscribe him. 

A score of years ago two friends, now, alas! both 
doctors of philosophy, of letters, and of laws, agreed to 
superscribe their letters simply Smythe Johnes and 
Johnes Smythe respectively, without any vain prefix or 
affix. They kept up this good custom till in process 
of time they went to Europe for prolonged sojourns, 
and there corrupted their manners, so that when they 
came home they began addressing each other as Esq., 
and have done so ever since. Neither is any the better 
for the honors they exchange on the envelopes they do 
not look at, and doubtless if mankind could be brought 
to the renunciation of the vain prefixes and affixes which 
these friends once disused the race would be none the 
worse for it, but all the better. One prints Mr. Smythe 
Johnes on one's visiting-card because it passes through 
the hands of a menial who is not to be supposed for a 
moment to announce plain Smythe Johnes; but it is 
the United States post-office which delivers the letters 
of Smythe Johnes, and they can suffer no contamina- 
tion from a service which conveys the letters of plain 
William H. Taft to him with merely the explanatory 
affix of President, lest thev should go to some other 
William H. Taft. 

Undoubtedly the address of a person by the name 
with which he was christened can convey no shadow 
of disrespect. The Society of Eriends understood this 
from the beginning, and they felt that they were want- 
ing in no essential civility when they refused name- 
honor as well as hat-honor to all and every. They re- 
mained covered in the highest presences, and addressed 
each by his Christian name, without conveying slight; 
so that a King and Queen of England, who had once 
questioned whether they could suffer themselves to be 

267 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

called Thy Majesty instead of Your Majesty by cer- 
tain Quakers, found it no derogation of their dignity 
to be saluted as Friend George and Friend Charlotte. 
The signory of the proudest republic in the world held 
that their family names were of sufficiency to which 
titles could add nothing, and the Venetian who called 
himself Loredano, or Gradenigo, or Morosini, or Renier, 
or Rezzonico did not ask to be called differently. In 
our own day a lady of the ancient and splendid family 
of the Peruzzi in Florence denied that the title of 
count existed in it or need exist: " Ognuno pud essere 
conte: Peruzzi, no." (" Any one may be a count; but 
not a Peruzzi.") In like manner such names as Lincoln 
and Franklin, and Washington and Grant, and Long- 
fellow and Bryant could have gained nothing by Mr. 
before them or Esq. after them. Doctor Socrates or 
Doctor Seneca would not have descended to us in higher 
regard with the help of these titles ; and Rear- Admiral 
Themistocles or Major-General Epaminondas could not 
have had greater glory from the survival of parchments 
so directed to them. 

The Venetian nobles who disdained titles came in 
process of time to be saluted as Illustrissimo ; but in 
process of time this address when used orally began to 
shed its syllables till Illustrissimo became Lustrissimo, 
and then Strissimo, and at last Striss, when perhaps the 
family name again sufficed. So with us, Doctor has 
familiarly become " Doc/' and Captain, " Cap," until 
one might rather have no title at all. Mr. itself is a 
grotesque malformation of a better word, and Miss is 
a silly shortening of the fine form of Mistress. This, 
pronounced Misses, can hardly add dignity to the name 
of the lady addressed, though doubtless it cannot be 
disused till we are all of the Society of Friends. The 
popular necessity has resulted in the vulgar vocative 

268 



EPISTOLAEY ADDKESSES 

use of Lady, but the same use of Gentleman has not 
even a vulgar success, though it is not unknown. You 
may say, with your hand on the bell-strap, " Step lively, 
lady," but you cannot say, " Step lively, gentleman," 
and the fine old vocative " Sir " is quite obsolete. We 
ourselves remember it on the tongues of two elderly 
men who greeted each other with " Sir !" and " Sir !" 
when they met; and " Step lively, sir," might convey 
the same delicate regard from the trolley conductor as 
" Step lively, lady." Sir might look very well on the 
back of a letter; Smythe Johnes, Sir, would on some 
accounts be preferable to Smythe Johnes, Esq., and, 
oddly enough, it would be less archaic. 

Such of our readers as have dined with the late Queen 
or the present King of England will recall how much 
it eased the yoke of ceremony to say to the sovereign, 
" Yes, ma'am," or " Yes, sir," as the use is, instead of 
your Majesty. But to others you cannot say " Yes, 
ma'am," or " Yes, sir," unless you are in that station 
of life to which you would be very sorry it had pleased 
God to call you. Yet these forms seem undeniably fit 
when used by the young to their elders, if the difference 
of years is great enough. 

The difficulty remains, however. You cannot as yet 
write on an envelope, Smythe Johnes, Sir, or Mary 
Johnes, Lady; and, in view of this fact, we find our- 
selves no nearer the solution of our constant reader's 
difficulty than we were at first. The Socialists, who 
wish to simplify themselves and others, would address 
Mr. Johnes as Comrade Smythe Johnes, but could they 
address Mrs. Johnes as Comradess ? We fancy not ; 
besides, Comrade suggests arms and bloodshed, which 
is hardly the meaning of the red flag of brotherhood, 
and at the best Comrade looks affected and sounds even 
more so. Friend would be better, but orally, on the 

260 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

lips of non - Quakers, it has an effect of patronage, 
though no one could rightly feel slight in a letter ad- 
dressed to him as Friend Smythe Johnes. 

It is wonderful to consider how the ancients appar- 
ently got on without the use of any sort of prefix or 
affix to their names on the roll of parchment or fold 
of papyrus addressed to them. For all we know, Csesar 
was simply C. Julius Cresar to his correspondents, and 
Pericles was yet more simply Pericles to the least of 
his fellow-citizens. These historical personages may 
have had the number of their houses inscribed on their 
letters ; or Pericles might have had Son of Xanthippus 
added to his name for purposes of identification; but 
apparently he managed quite as well as our Presidents, 
without anything equivalent to Excellency or Hon. or 
Mr. or Esq. To be sure, with the decline of 

" The glory that was Greece 
And the grandeur that was Rome," 

name-honors crept in more and more. It was then not 
only politer but much safer to address your petition 
To the Divine Domitian, or To the Divine Nero, than 
to greet those emperors by the mere given names which 
were not yet Christian ; probably it would not have 
been enough to add Ciesar to the last name, though 
Ca?sar seems to have finally served the turn of Esq., 
for all the right that the emperors had to bear it. In 
the Eastern Empire, we are not ready to say what was 
the correct style for imperial dignitaries ; but among the 
sovereigns who divided the Roman state and inherited 
its splendor, some rulers came to be sacred majesties, 
though this is still a sensible remove from divine. 

However, our present difficulty is with that vast aver- 
age who in common parlance are Mr. and Mrs. Smythe 

Johnes. How shall they be styled on the backs of their 

270 



EPISTOLAKY ADDRESSES 

letters ? How shall Mrs. Smythe Johnes especially, in 
signing herself Mary Johnes, indicate that she is not 
Miss Mary bnt Mrs. Smythe Johnes? When she is 
left a widow, how soon does she cease to be Mrs. Smythe 
Johnes and become Mrs. Mary? Is it requisite to 
write in the case of any literary doctorate, Smythe 
Johnes, LL.D., or Litt.D., or Ph.D., or is it sufficient 
to write Dr. before his name ? In the case of a divine, 
do you put Rev. Dr. before the name, or Rev. before it 
and D.D. after it ? These are important questions, or, 
if they are not important, they are at least interesting. 
Among the vast mass of unceremonied, or call it un- 
mannered, Americans the receiver of a letter probably 
knows no better than the sender how it should be ad- 
dressed; but in the rarer case in which he does know, 
his self-respect or his self-love is wounded if it is mis- 
addressed. It is something like having your name mis- 
spelled, though of course not so bad as that, quite; and 
every one would be glad to avoid the chance of it. 

The matter is very delicate and can hardly be man- 
aged by legislation, as it was on the point of our pen 
to suggest it should be. The first French Republic, one 
and indivisible, decreed a really charming form of ad- 
dress, which could be used without offence to the self- 
love or the self-respect of any one. Citoyen for all 
men and Citoyenne for all women was absolutely taste- 
ful, modest, and dignified ; but some things, though they 
are such kindred things, cannot be done as well as others. 
The same imaginative commonwealth invented a deci- 
mal chronology, and a new era, very handy and very 
clear; but the old week of seven days came back and 
replaced the week of ten days, and the Year of our 
Lord resumed the place of the Year of the Republic, 
as Monsieur and Madame returned victorious over 
Citoyen and Citovenne. Yet the reform of weights 

271 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

and measures, when once established, continued, and 
spread from France to most other countries — to nearly 
all, indeed, less stupid than Great Britain and the 
United States — so that the whole civilized world now 
counts in grammes and metres. What can be the fine 
difference ? Here is a pretty inquiry for the psychol- 
ogist, who has an opportunity to prove himself prac- 
tically useful. Is it that grammes and metres are less 
personal than week - days and addresses ? That can 
hardly be, or else the Society of Friends could not have 
so absolutely substituted First Day and Second Day, 
etc., for the old heathen names of our week-days, and 
could not have successfully refused all name - honor 
whatsoever in addressing their fellow-mortals. 

But titles have come back full - tide in the third 
French Republic, one and indivisible, so that anybody 
may wear them, though the oldest nobility are officially 
and legally known only by their Christian and family 
names, without any prefix. This is practically return- 
ing to Citoyen and Citoyenne, and it almost gives us 
the courage to suggest the experiment of Citizen and 
Citizenne as a proper address on the letters of American 
republicans. The matter might be referred to a Board, 
something like that of the Simplified Spelling Board, 
though we should not like to be included in a committee 
whose members must be prepared to take their lives in 
their hands, or, short of death, to suffer every manner 
of shame at the hands of our journalists and their 
correspondents. Short of the adoption of Citizen and 
Citizenne, we have no choice but to address one another 
by our given names and surnames merely, unless we 
prefer to remain in our present confusion of Mr. and 
Esq. In a very little while, we dare say, no lady or 
gentleman would mind being so addressed on his or her 

letters ; but perhaps some men and women might. Now 

272 



EPISTOLARY ADDRESSES 

that we no longer use pets names so much, except among 
the very highest of our noblesse, where there are still 
Jimmies and Mamies, we believe, plain Gladys Smythe 
or Reginald Johnes would be the usual superscription. 
Such an address could bring no discomfort to the re- 
cipient (a beautiful word, very proper in this connec- 
tion), and if it could once be generally adopted it would 
save a great deal of anxiety. The lady's condition could 
be indicated by the suffix Spinster, in the case of her 
being single; if married, the initials of her husband's 
given names could be added. 



Ill 

DRESSING FOR HOTEL DINNER 

Among the high excitements of a recent winter in 
New York was one of such convulsive intensity that in 
the nature of things it could not last very long. It 
affected the feminine temperament of our public with 
hysterical violence, but left the community the calmer 
for its throes, and gently, if somewhat pensively, smil- 
ing in a permanent ignorance of the event. No outside 
observer would now be able to say, offhand, whether a 
certain eminent innkeeper had or had not had his way 
with his customers in the matter not only of what they 
should eat or drink, but what they should wear when 
dining in a place which has been described as " sup- 
plying exclusiveness to the lower classes." It is not 
even certain just how a crucial case was brought to the 
notice of this authority; what is certain is that his in- 
stant judgment was that no white male citizen fre- 
quenting his proud tavern should sit at dinner there 
unless clothed in a dress-coat, or at least in the smoking- 
jacket known to us as a Tuxedo; at breakfast or at 
luncheon, probably, the guest, the paying guest, could 
sufficiently shine in the reflected glory of the lustrous 
evening wear of the waiters. No sooner was the inn- 
keeper's judgment rendered than a keen thrill of re- 
sentment, or at least amusement, ran through the gen- 
eral breast. From every quarter the reporters hastened 

274 



DRESSING FOR HOTEL DINNER 

to verify the fact at first-hand, and then to submit it 
to the keeper of every other eminent inn or eating- 
house in the city and learn his usage and opinion. 
These to a man disavowed any such hard-and-fast rule. 
Though their paying guests were ordinarily gentle- 
men of such polite habits as to be incapable of dining 
in anything but a dress-coat or a Tuxedo, yet their inns 
and eating-houses were not barred against those who 
chose to dine in a frock or cutaway or even a sacque. 
It is possible that the managers imagined themselves 
acquiring merit with that large body of our vulgar who 
demand exclusiveness by their avowal of a fine indif- 
ference or an enlightened tolerance in the matter. But 
at this distance of time no one can confidently say how 
the incident was closed with respect to the pre-eminent 
innkeeper and his proud tavern. Whether the way- 
farer, forced by the conditions of travel upon the com- 
pany of the exclusive vulgar, may now dine there in 
the public banqueting-hall in his daytime raiment, or 
must take his evening meal in his room, with a penalty 
in the form of an extra charge for service, nowise ap- 
pears. 

What is apparent from the whole affair is that the 
old ideal of one's inn, as a place where one shall take 
one's ease, has perished in the evolution of the mag- 
nificent American hotel which we have been maliciously 
seeking to minify in the image of its Old World 
germ. One may take one's ease in one's hotel only 
if one is dressed to the mind of the hotel - keeper, 
or perhaps finally the head waiter. But what is 
more important still is that probably the vast multi- 
tude of the moneyed vulgar whose exclusiveness is sup- 
plied to them in such a place dictate, tacitly at least, the 
Draconian policy of the management. No innkeeper 
or head waiter, no matter of how patrician an experi- 

275 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

ence or prejudice, would imagine a measure of such 
hardship to wayfarers willing to pay for the simple 
comfort of their ancestors at the same rate as their 
commensals stiffly shining in the clothes of convention. 
The management might have its conception of what a 
hotel dining-room should look like, with an unbroken 
array of gentlemen in black dress-coats and ladies in 
white shoulders all feeding as superbly as if they were 
not paying for their dinners, or as if they had been 
severally asked for the pleasure of their company two 
Aveeks before; and the picture would doubtless be 
marred by figures of people in cutaways and high necks, 
to a degree intolerable to the artistic sense. But it is 
altogether impossible that the management would exact 
a conformity to the general effect which was not desired 
by the vast majority of its paying guests. What might 
well have seemed a break on the part of the pre-eminent 
innkeeper when he cited as a precedent for his decision 
the practice of the highest hotels in London was really 
no break, but a stroke of the finest juridical acumen. 
Nothing could have gone further with the vast majority 
of his paying guests than some such authority, for they 
could wish nothing so much, in the exclusiveness sup- 
plied them, as the example of the real characters in the 
social drama which they were impersonating. They 
had the stage and the scenery; they had spared no ex- 
pense in their costuming; they had anxiously studied 
their parts, and for the space of their dinner-hour they 
had the right to the effect of aristocratic society, which 
they were seeking, unmarred by one discordant note. 
After that hour, let it be a cramped stall in the orchestra 
of another theatre, or let it be an early bed in a cell of 
their colossal columbary, yet they would have had their 
dinner-hour when they shone primarily just like the 
paying guests in the finest English hotel, and seconda- 

276 



DRESSING FOE HOTEL DINNER 

rily just like the non-paying guests at the innumerable 
dinners of the nobilitv and gentry in a thousand private 
houses in London. 

Our aim is always high, and they would be right to 
aim at nothing lower than this in their amateur dra- 
matics. But here we have a question which we have 
been holding back by main force from the beginning, 
and which now persists in precipitating itself in our 
peaceful page. It is a question which merits wider and 
closer study than we can give it, and it will, we hope, 
find an answer such as we cannot supply in the wisdom 
of the reader. It presented itself to the mind of Eu- 
genio in a recent experience of his at a famous seaside 
resort which does not remit its charm even in the heart 
of winter, and which with the first tremor of the open- 
ing spring allures the dweller among the sky-scrapers 
and the subways with an irresistible appeal. We need 
not further specify the place, but it is necessary to add 
that it draws not only the jaded or sated New- Yorker, 
but the more eager and animated average of well-to-do 
people from every part of their country who have got 
bored out with their happy homes and want a few days' 
or a few weeks' change. One may not perhaps meet 
a single distinguished figure on its famous promenade, 
or at least more distinguished than one's own; with 
the best will in the world to find such figures, Eugenio 
could count but three or four : a tall, alert, correct man 
or two ; an electly fashioned, perfectly set-up, dominant 
woman or so, whose bearing expressed the supremacy 
of a set in some unquestionable world. But there was 
obvious riches aplenty, and aplenty of the kind whole- 
someness of the good, true, intelligent, and heaven- 
bound virtue of what we must begin to call our middle 
class, offensive as the necessity may be. Here and there 
the effect of champagne in the hair, which deceived no 

277 



IMAGINAKY INTEKVIEWS 

one but the wearer, was to be noted; here and there, 
high-rolling, a presence with the effect of something 
more than champagne in the face loomed in the per- 
spective through the haze of a costly cigar. But by far, 
immensely far, the greater number of his fellow-fre- 
quenters of the charming promenade were simple, do- 
mestic, well-meaning Americans like Eugenio himself, 
of a varying simplicity indeed, but always of a sim- 
plicity. They were the stuff with which his fancy (he 
never presumed to call it his imagination) had hitherto 
delighted to play, fondly shaping out of the collective 
material those lineaments and expressions which he 
hoped contained a composite likeness of his American 
day and generation. The whole situation was most 
propitious, and yet he found himself moving through it 
without one of the impulses which had been almost life- 
long with him. As if in some strange paralysis, some 
obsession by a demon of indifference unknown before, 
he was bereft of the will to realize these familiar pro- 
tagonists of his plain dramas. He knew them, of 
course; he knew them all too well; but he had not 
the wish to fit the likest of them with phrases, to cos- 
tume them for their several parts, to fit them into the 
places in the unambitious action where they had so often 
contributed to the modest but inevitable catastrophe. 

The experience repeated itself till he began to take 
himself by the collar and shake himself in the dismay 
of a wild conjecture. What had befallen him? Had 
he gone along, young, eager, interested, delighted with 
his kind for half a century of sesthetic consciousness, 
and now had he suddenly lapsed into the weariness and 
apathy of old age ? It is always, short of ninety, too 
soon for that, and Eugenio was not yet quite ninety. 
Was his mind, then, prematurely affected? But was 
not this question itself proof that his mind was still 

278 



DRESSING FOB HOTEL DINNER 

importunately active \ If that was so, why did not he 
still wish to make his phrases about his like, to repro- 
duce their effect in composite portraiture? Eugenio 
fell into a state so low that nothing but the confession 
of his perplexity could help him out ; and the friend to 
whom he owned his mystifying, his all but appalling, 
experience did not fail him in his extremity. " No," 
he wrote back, " it is not that you have seen all these 
people, and that they offer no novel types for observa- 
tion, but even more that they illustrate the great fact 
that, in the course of the last twenty years, society in 
America has reached its goal, has ' arrived/ and is 
creating no new types. On the contrary, it is obliterat- 
ing some of the best which were clearly marked, and 
is becoming more and more one rich, dead level of medi- 
ocrity, broken here and there by solitary eminences, 
some of which are genuine, some only false peaks with- 
out solid rock foundations." 

Such a view of his case must be immediately and 
immensely consoling, but it was even more precious to 
Eugenio for the suggestion from which his fancy — never 
imagination — began to play forward with the vivacity 
of that of .a youth of sixty, instead of a middle-aged 
man of eighty-five. If all this were true — and its truth 
shone the more distinctly from a ground of potential 
dissent — was not there the stuff in the actual conditions 
from which a finer artist than he could ever hope to 
be, now that the first glow of his prime was past, might 
fashion an image of our decadence, or our arrest, so 
grandly, so perfectly dull and uninteresting, that it 
would fix all the after-ages with the sovereign authority 
of a masterpiece ? Here, he tremblingly glowed to real- 
ize, was opportunity, not for him, indeed, but for some 
more modern, more divinely inspired lover of the medi- 
ocre, to eternize our typelessness and establish himself 

279 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

among the many-millioned heirs of fame. It had been 
easy — how easy it had been! — to catch the likeness of 
those formative times in which he had lived and 
wrought; but the triumph and the reward of the new 
artist would be in proportion to the difficulty of seizing 
the rich, self - satisfied, ambitionless, sordid common- 
place of a society wishing to be shut up in a steam- 
heated, electric-lighted palace and fed fat in its exclu- 
siveness with the inexhaustible inventions of an over- 
paid chef. True, the strong, simple days of the young 
republic, when men forgot themselves in the struggle 
with the wild continent, were past ; true, the years were 
gone when the tremendous adventure of tearing from 
her heart the iron and the gold which were to bind 
her in lasting subjection gave to fiction industrial 
heroes fierce and bold as those of classic fable or medi- 
aeval romance. But there remained the days of the 
years which shall apparently have no end, but shall 
abound forever in an inexhaustible wealth of the sort 
wishing not so much to rise itself as to keep down and 
out all suggestion of the life from which it sprang. 

The sort of type which would represent this condi- 
tion would be vainly sought in any exceptionally opu- 
lent citizen of that world. He would have, if nothing 
else, the distinction of his unmeasured millions, which 
would form a poetry, however sordid; the note of the 
world we mean is indistinction, and the protagonist of 
the fiction seeking to portray its fads and characters 
must not have more than two or three millions at the 
most. He, or better she, were better perhaps with only 
a million, or a million and a half, or enough to live 
handsomely in eminent inns, either at home or abroad, 
with that sort of insolent half-knowledge to which cult- 
ure is contemptible ; which can feel the theatre, but not 

literature ; which has passed from the horse to the auto- 

280 



DRESSING FOE HOTEL DIN NEE 

mobile; which has its moral and material yacht, cruis- 
ing all social coasts and making port in none where 
there is not a hotel or cottage life as empty and ex- 
clusive as its own. Even in trying to understate the 
sort, one overstates it. Nothing could be more untrue 
to its reality than the accentuation of traits which in 
the arrivals of society elsewhere and elsewhen have 
marked the ultimation of the bourgeois spirit. Say 
that the Puritan, the Pilgrim, the Cavalier, and the 
Merchant Adventurer have come and gone ; say that the 
Revolutionist Patriot, the Pioneer and the Backwoods- 
man and the Noble Savage have come and gone; say 
that the Slaveholder and the Slave and the Abolitionist 
and the Civil Warrior have come and gone ; say that the 
Miner, the Rancher, the Cowboy, and the sardonically 
humorous Frontiersman have come and gone; say that 
the simple-hearted, hard-working, modest, genial Home- 
makers have come and gone; say that the Captain of 
Industry has come and gone, and the world-wide Finan- 
cier is going: what remains for actuality-loving art to 
mould into shapes of perdurable beauty? Obviously, 
only the immeasurable mass of a prosperity sunken in 
a self-satisfaction unstirred by conscience and unmoved 
by desire. But is that a reason why art should despair ? 
Rather it is a reason why it should rejoice in an op- 
portunity occurring not more than once in the ages to 
seize the likeness and express the significance of Ar- 
rival, the arrival of a whole civilization. To do this, 
art must refine and re-refine upon itself; it must use 
methods of unapproached delicacy, of unimagined 
subtlety and celerity. It is easy enough to catch the 
look of the patrician in the upper air, of the plebeian 
underfoot, but to render the image of a world-bour- 
geoisie, compacted in characters of undeniable verisi- 
militude, that will be difficult, but it will be possible, 
19 281 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

and the success will be of an effulgence such as has 
never yet taken the eyes of wonder. 

We should not be disposed to deny the artist, dedi- 
cated to this high achievement by his love of the ma- 
terial not less than by his peculiar gift, the range of a 
liberal idealism. We would not have him bound by any 
procedent or any self-imposed law of literality. If he 
should see his work as a mighty historical picture, or 
series of such pictures, we should not gainsay him his 
conception or bind him rather to any genre result. We 
ourselves have been evolving here the notion of some 
large allegory which should bear the relation to all 
other allegories that Bartholdi's colossus of Liberty 
bears to all other statues, and which should carry for- 
ward the story and the hero, or the heroine, to some 
such supreme moment as that when, amid the approving 
emotion of an immense hotel dining-room, all in decol- 
letee and frac pare, the old, simple-lived American, 
wearing a sack-coat and a colored shirt, shall be led out 
between the eminent innkeeper and the head waiter and 
delivered over to the police to be conducted in ignominy 
to the nearest Italian table d'hote. The national char- 
acter, on the broad level of equality which fiction once 
delighted to paint, no longer exists, but if a deeper, a 
richer, a more enduring monotony replaces it, we have 
no fear but some genius will arrive and impart the ef- 
fect of the society which has arrived. 



IV 



THE COUNSEL OF LITERARY AGE TO LITERARY 
YOUTH 

As Eugenio — we will call hiia Eugenic-: a fine im- 
personal name — grew older, and became, rightfully or 
wrongfully, more and more widely known for his writ- 
ings, he found himself increasingly the subject of ap- 
peal from young writers who wished in their turn to 
become, rightfully or wrongfully, more and more widely 
known. This is not, indeed, stating the case with the 
precision which we like. His correspondents were 
young enough already, but they were sometimes not 
yet writers; they had only the ambition to be writers. 
Our loose formulation of the fact, however, will cover 
all its meaning, and we will let it go that they were 
young writers, for, whether they were or not, they all 
wished to know one thing: namely, how he did it. 

What, they asked in varying turns, was his secret, his 
recipe for making the kind of literature which had 
made him famous : they did stint their phrase, and they 
said famous. That always caused Eugenio to blush, at 
first with shame and then with pleasure ; whatever one's 
modesty, one likes to be called famous, and Eugenio's 
pleasure in their flatteries was so much greater than 
his shame that he thought only how to return them the 
pleasure unmixed with the shame. His heart went out 
to those generous youths, who sometimes confessed 
themselves still in their teens, and often of the sex 

283 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

which is commonly most effective with the fancy while 
still in its teens. It seemed such a very little thing 
to show them the way to do what he had done, and, 
while disclaiming any merit for it, to say why it was 
the best possible way. If they had grouped him with 
other widely known writers in their admiration, he 
never imagined directing his correspondents to those 
others' methods; he said to himself that he did not 
understand them, and at bottom he felt that it would 
have been better taste in the generous youths to have 
left them out of the question. 

In the end he never answered his correspondents in 
the handsome way he had fancied. Generally he did 
not answer them at all, or, if he did, he put them off 
with some such cheap excuse as advising them to be sure 
they had something to say, and then to say it as simply 
and clearly as they could. He knew very well that this 
was begging the question; that the question was how 
to be artistic, graceful, charming, and whatever else 
they said he himself was. If he was aware of not 
being all that, he was aware also of having tried, to 
be it ; of having sought from the beginning to captivate 
the reader's fancy as well as convince his reason. He 
had never been satisfied with being plain and direct; 
he had constantly wished to amuse as well as edify, and 
following the line of beauty, as that of the least re- 
sistance, had been his practice if not his precept. If 
he counselled his correspondents otherwise, he would 
be uncandid, and when he had imagined putting them 
off in that fashion he was more ashamed than he had 
been with their praise. 

Yet, upon reflection, he perceived that what they 
asked was impossible. If ever he had a formula he 
had lost it; he was no longer in his own secret, if ever 
he had been. All that he could have said with perfect 

284 



THE COUNSEL OF LITEEAEY AGE 

honesty would have been that he had never found any 
royal road to literature; that to his experience there 
was not even a common highway ; that there were only 
byways ; private paths over other people's grounds ; ease- 
ments beaten out by feet that had passed before, and 
giving by a subsequent overgrowth of turf or brambles 
a deceitful sense of discovery to the latest-comer. 

His correspondents would not have liked that. He 
knew that what they wanted was his measure of the 
old success in some new way, which they could feel 
their own after it had been shown them. But the only 
secret that he was still in was the very open one of 
working hard at whatever he had in hand, and this he 
suspected they would have scorned sharing with him. 
He could have said that if you want to keep three or 
five balls in the air at once you must learn how by 
practising ; but they knew that as well as he ; what they 
asked was being enabled to do it themselves from Ms 
having practised. 

The perception of this fact made Eugenio very sad, 
and he asked himself if the willingness to arrive only 
after you had got there had gone out of the world and 
left nothing but the ambition to be at this point or that 
without the trouble of having reached it. He smiled 
as he recalled the stock criticism of the connoisseur in 
The Vicar of Wakefield, that the picture would have 
been better if the painter had taken more pains; but 
he did not smile gayly: there seemed to him a sum of 
pathetic wisdom in the saying which might well weigh 
down the blithest spirit. It had occurred to him in 
connection with an old essay of Hazlitt's, which he had 
been reading, on the comparative methods of English 
and French painters in their work. The essayist held, 
almost literally, that the Erench pictures were better 
because the Erench painters had taken more pains, and 

285 



IMAGINAEY INTERVIEWS 

taken especial pains in the least interesting parts of 
their pictures. He was dealing more specifically with 
copying, but his words applied to the respective schools 
in their highest work, and he could only save his patri- 
otic pride, so far as he might, by saying : " Courage 
is pure will without regard to consequences, and this 
the English have in perfection. Poetry is our element, 
for the essence of poetry is will and passion. The 
English fail as a people in the fine arts, namely, be- 
cause the end with them absorbs the means." 

Eugenio knew nothing practically and very little 
theoretically of painting; but it appeared to him that 
what Hazlitt said was of equal force with respect to 
the fine art of literature; and that in his own 
American field the English race failed, as far as 
it had failed, for the same reason as that given by Haz- 
litt for its failure in painting. In his mind he went 
further than Hazlitt, or came short of him, in refusing 
the consolation of our race's superiority in poetry be- 
cause it was will and passion. As far as they had ex- 
celled in that, it was because they had tried hard and 
not neglected the means for the end. Where they had 
excelled most, it was quite imaginable that the poem 
would still have been better if the poet had taken more 
pains. In the case of prose, he thought we failed of 
the end because we were impatient of the means, and 
as elderly men will, he accused the present of being 
more hasty and indifferent to form than the past. He 
recalled the time when he was apprentice in the art in 
which he could not yet call himself a master workman, 
and thought how he tried to make what he did beautiful, 
and fashioned his work with tireless pains after some 
high model. Perhaps the young writers of this time 
were striving as earnestly; but he could not see it, or 
thought he could not. He fancied their eyes dazzled 

28G 



THE COUNSEL OF LITERARY AGE 

by the images of easy success, instead of taken with 
the glory of a thing beautifully done. He remembered, 
with fond emotion, how once his soul had glowed over 
some " cunning' st pattern of excelling nature/ 7 and had 
been filled with longing to learn from it the art of sur- 
prising some other mood or aspect of nature and mak- 
ing that loveliness or grandeur his own. He had talked 
with other youths who were trying at the same time 
to do good work, and he remembered that they too 
were trying in the same way; and now, long after, he 
fancied that their difference from the youth of the pres- 
ent day was in their willingness to strive for perfection 
in the means and to let the end take care of itself. The 
end could no more justify bad means in sesthetics than 
in ethics; in fact, without the carefully studied means 
there could be no artistic result. If it was true that 
the young writers of the present expected a high result 
from hurried or neglected processes, they could have 
only the results that Eugenio saw around him. If they 
admired these, and were coming to him for the secret 
of achieving them, they were coming to the wrong shop. 
Yet he did not harshly blame them. He remem- 
bered how he, too, when he had been impatient of the 
means, had once fancied postponing them to the end. 
That was in the days which were mainly filled for him 
with the business of writing fiction, and when the 
climax of his story seemed always threatening to hide 
itself from him or to elude his grasp. There were times 
when it changed to some other end or took a different 
significance from that it had primarily had. Then he 
had said to himself that if he could only write the end 
first, or boldly block it out as it first presented itself, 
and afterward go back and write in the events and char- 
acters leading up to it, he would have an effect glorified 
by all the fervor of his primal inspiration. But he 

287 



IMAGINAKY INTEEVIEWS 

never did that, or even tried to do it. Perhaps, when 
he came to consider it more carefully, it appeared im- 
possible; perhaps it approved itself ridiculous without 
experiment. His work of art, such as it was, was a 
growth from all his thinking and feeling about it; and 
without that it could no more eventuate in a climax 
than a tree could ripen fruit without the preliminaries 
of striking its roots into the ground, coming of the 
age to bear, and then some springtime budding, put- 
ting out leaves, breaking into blossom, and setting 
its young apples, or whatever else it was going to 
bear. The fruit it bore would be according to its kind, 
and he might have been mistakenly expecting to grow 
peaches from an apple stock when he was surprised to 
find apples on it, or the end of his novel turning out 
other than he had forecast it. 

In literature the reader's affair is with results, but 
the author's with processes. Eugenio had realized this 
more and more distinctly, and, as he now reflected on 
the appeals of those fond young correspondents of his, 
it occurred to him that their confusion as to literary 
methods and manners lay in their being still readers so 
largely and so little authors as yet. They were dealing 
with the end, in their mistaken minds, and not with the 
means, as they supposed. The successes which dazzled 
them might very well have been written backward in 1 
some such fashion as he had once imagined, for the 
end was the main thing with them, and was the end of 
the story as well as the end of the book. But the true 
story never ends. The close of the book is simply the 
point at which the author has stopped, and, if he has 
stopped wisely, the reader takes up the tale and goes 
on with it in his own mind. 

As for the variance of the close from the forecast 
of it, Eugenio was less and less dismayed by that, when 

288 



THE COUNSEL OF LITERARY AGE 

in the course of time he looked more closely at his own 
life and the lives of other men. Only on some spiritual 
terms was there the fulfilment of forecast in them, and 
the more art resembled life the less responsive it was to 
any hard-and-fast design. He perceived that to find the 
result changing from the purpose might very well be a 
proof of vitality in it, an evidence of unconscious in- 
sight, the sort of inspiration that comes to crown faith- 
ful work with unimagined beauty. He looked round 
at the great works of literary art, and he believed that 
he saw in them the escape from implicit obedience to a 
first intention. Only in the inferior things, the me- 
chanical things, could he discern obedience. In some- 
thing supreme, like Hamlet, say, there was everything 
to make him think that the processes had educated 
Shakespeare as to the true nature of his sublime en- 
deavor and had fixed the terms of its close. Probably 
the playwright started with the notion of making Ham- 
let promptly kill his stepfather, rescue Ophelia from 
the attempt to climb out over the stream on a willow 
branch, forgive his erring mother as more sinned 
against than sinning, welcome Laertes back to Den- 
mark, and with the Ghost of his father blessing the 
whole group, and Polonius with his arm in a sling, 
severely but not fatally wounded, form the sort of stage 
picture, as the curtain went down, that has sent audi- 
ences home, dissolved in happy tears, from so many 
theatres. But Shakespeare, being a dramatist as well 
as a playwright, learned from Hamlet himself that 
Hamlet could not end as he had meant him to end. 
Hamlet, in fact, could not really end at all, and, in the 
sort of anticlimax in which the tragedy closes, he must 
rise from death, another and a truer ghost than the 
buried majesty of Denmark, and walk the world forever. 
Could Eugenio, however, advise his youthful corre- 

289 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

spondents to work so reckless of their original concep- 
tions as Shakespeare had probably done? The ques- 
tion was serious; it put him upon his conscience, and 
he decided that at the most he could not do more than 
urge them, with all the earnestness of his nature, to 
write their Hamlets from the beginning forward, and 
never from the ending backward, even in their own 
minds. He saw that if he were to answer them col- 
lectively (and he certainly did not intend to answer 
thein severally) he must say that their only hope of 
producing an effective whole was through indefatigable 
work upon every part. "Make each smallest detail beau- 
tiful, and despise none because it seemed to perform 
a poor and lowly office in the assemblage of the parts. 
Let these youths be sure that they could not know the 
meaning of any design from imagining it, but only 
from expressing it, and that the true result could come 
only from the process. They could not hope to outdo 
Shakespeare and foreknow their respective Hamlets; 
they must slowly make their Hamlets' acquaintance by 
living with them. 

If Eugenio's correspondents were dashed by this hard 
saying, he thought he might raise their spirits by adding 
that they would find compensation for their slow, ardu- 
ous toil in particulars from a fact which he had noted 
in his own case. A thing well done looks always very 
much better in the retrospect than could have been 
hoped. A good piece of work would smile radiantly 
upon them when it was accomplished. Besides, after a 
certain experience in doing, they would learn that the 
greatest happiness which could come to them from their 
work would be through the perfecting of details. This 
would make their performance a succession of little 
victories which alone could constitute the great ultimate 
triumph. 

290 



THE COUNSEL OE LITEEAKY AGE 

" But style, but style !" they might return. " What 
about style? That was one of the miracles we asked 
you the sleight of, and are you going to say nothing 
about that ? Or did you mean style, in your talk about 
perfecting details ? Do you want us to take infinite 
pains in acquiring a style P 

" By no means," Eugenio was prepared to declare 
in the event of this come-back. " Do not think about 
style. If you do your work well, patiently, faithfully, 
truly, style will infallibly be added unto you. That is 
the one thing you must not try for. If you try for 
style, you will be like a man thinking about his clothes 
or his manners. You will be self-conscious, which is 
the fatal opposite of being yourself. You will be your- 
self when you are lost in your work, and then you will 
come into the only style that is proper to you: the 
beauty and the grace that any sort of workman has 
in the exercise of his craft. You will then have, with- 
out seeking it, your own swing of phrase, your own turn 
of expression, your own diction, and these will be your 
style by which every reader will know you. But if you 
have a manner which you have borrowed or imitated, 
people will see that it is second-hand and no better than 
something shop-worn or cast off. Besides, style is a 
thing that has been grossly overvalued in the general 
appraisal of literary qualities. The stylists are not the 
greatest artists, the supreme artists. Who would think 
of Shakespeare as a stylist, or Tolstoy, or Dante ?" 

Eugenio thought he could count upon a vanity in his 
correspondents so dense as not to be pierced by any 
irony. In fact, it could not be said that, though he felt 
the pathos of their appeals, he greatly respected the 
motives which actuated them in writing to him. They 
themselves respected their motives because they did not 
know them as he did, but probably they did not pity 

291 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

themselves so much as he pitied them. He realized that 
they turned to him from a literary remoteness which 
they did not realize, and it was very natural that they 
should turn for help outside their circumstance; but 
Eugenio had not lived to his age without learning that 
many natural impulses are mistaken if not wrong. He 
reflected sadly that those far-off solitaries could alone 
burst their circumstance and find their way out of it. 
He perceived that they could do this only by their own 
devout and constant toil in the line of their aspiration. 
But would it avail to tell them so ? 

One of the knowledges of a period of life which we 
will call the riper maturity is that we need all the ac- 
cumulated vigilance of the past to secure us from the 
ever-besetting dangers of the present: the dangers of 
indolence, of slovenly performance, of indistinct vision, 
of weakening conscience in our work. We need every 
atom of force, every particle of the stored electricity of 
youth, to keep us going in later years. While we are 
still young we are aware of an environing and per- 
vading censure, coming from the rivalry, the envy, the 
generous emulation, the approval, the disapproval, the 
love, the hate of all those who witness our endeavor. 
No smallest slip, no slightest defect will be lost upon 
this censure, equally useful whether sympathetic or an- 
tipathetic. But as we grow old we are sensible of a 
relaxing, a lifting, a withdrawal of the environing and 
pervading censure. We have become the objects of a 
compassionate toleration or a contemptuous indiffer- 
ence ; it no longer matters greatly to the world whether 
we do our work well or ill. But if we love our work 
as we ought till we die, it should matter more than 
ever to us whether we do it well or ill. We have come 
to the most perilous days of our years when we are 

tempted not so much to slight our work as to spare our 

292 



THE COUNSEL OE LITERARY AGE 

nerves, in which the stored electricity is lower and 
scanter than it was, and to let a present feeble per- 
formance blight the fame of strenuous achievements 
in the past. We may then make our choice of two 
things — stop working ; stop going, cease to move, to 
exist — or gather at each successive effort whatever 
remains of habit, of conscience, of native force, and 
put it into effect till our work, which we have not 
dropped, drops us. 

Should Eugenio address these hard sayings to his 
appealing, his palpitating correspondents? He found 
himself on the point of telling them that of all the 
accumulated energies which could avail them when they 
came of his age, or were coming of it, there was none 
that would count for so much as the force of habit; 
and what could be more banal than that? It would 
not save it from banality if he explained that he meant 
the habit of loving the very best one can do, and doing 
that and not something less. It would still be banal 
to say that now in their youth was the only time they 
would have to form the habit of tirelessly doing their 
best at every point, and that they could not buy or 
beg or borrow such a habit for the simple reason that 
nobody who had it could sell or give or lend it. 

Besides, as Eugenio very well perceived, his corre- 
spondents were not only young now, but were always 
intending to be so. He remembered how it used to be 
with himself, and that was how it used to be. He saw 
abundance of old, or older, people about him, but he 
himself instinctively expected to live on and on, with- 
out getting older, and to hive up honey from experi- 
ence without the beeswa:: which alone they seemed to 
have stored from the opening flowers of the past. Yet, 
in due course of time, he found himself an old or older 
man simply through living on and on and not dying 

293 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

earlier. Upon the whole, he liked it and would not 
have gone back and died earlier if he could. But he 
felt that it would be useless trying to convince his 
youthful correspondents that, whether they liked it or 
not, they too would grow old, or older, if they lived. 
How, then, teach them by precept, if they would not 
learn by universal example, that unless they were to 
be very miserable old men, and even miserable old 
women, they must have the habit of work? How in- 
struct them further that unless they had the habit of 
good work, patient, faithful, fine work, the habit which 
no one can buy, beg, or borrow, because no one can 
sell, give, or lend it, they were worse than idle, cum- 
berers of the earth, with no excuse for being above it? 
If he had set out to do that, they might have re- 
torted upon him that he was making a petty personal 
matter of art, which was not only so much longer than 
life, but so much wider, deeper, and higher. In this 
event he saw that he would have nothing for it but to 
confirm his correspondents in their disappointment with 
him by declaring that art was a personal matter, and 
that though longer, it was not wider, deeper, or higher 
than life, and could not be. It might be mysterious in 
being personal, but it was not necessarily petty. It 
would be great if the artist was so, but not otherwise ; 
it could be fine on no other terms. There was a theory 
and an appearance that it existed somehow apart from 
the artist and that it made him. But the fact was he 
made it, partly wittingly, partly unwittingly; and it 
had no being except in his achievement. The power 
of imagining a work of art was the gift of nature, as 
being long or short, dark or *air was. The concern of 
him it was given to was how, after he found it out, to 
make the most of his gift. It had no power to make 
much or little of him. If he cherished it and served 

294 



THE COUNSEL OF LITERARY AGE 

it, when he had made sure of it, by fulfilling the law 
that its possession imposed, then it would rise up in 
something he had done and call him master. 

But how could Eugenio make such things — so true 
and yet so self-contradictory, so mutually repellent — 
clear to these simple-hearted young correspondents of 
his ? The more he thought of the matter, the more he 
resolved to do nothing about it. 



THE UNSATISFACTORINESS OF UNFRIENDLY 
CRITICISM 

It was the experience of Eugenic- that the criticisms 
of his books, when they were unfriendly, presented a 
varying offence, rather than a cumulative offence, as 
the years wore on. The criticisms of one's books are 
always hard to bear if they are unfavorable, but he 
thought that displeasure for displeasure the earlier re^- 
fusal to allow him certain merits was less displeasing 
than the later consent to take these merits for granted. 
To be taken for granted in any wise is to be limited. 
It is tantamount to having it said of one that, yes, one 
has those virtues, but one has no others. It comes 
also to saying that one has, of course, the defects of 
one's virtues ; though Eugenio noted that, when certain 
defects of his were taken for granted, it did not so 
distinctly and immediately follow that he was supposed 
to have the virtues of these. 

ISTow, Eugenio's theory of himself was that he was 
not limited, and that, if he modestly stopped short of 
infinity, it was because he chose. He had a feeling of 
always breaking new ground ; and he did not like being 
told that he was tilling the old glebe and harvesting the 
same crops, or that in the little garden-ground where 
he let his fancy play he was culling flowers of such 
familiar tint and scent that they seemed to be the very 
flowers he had picked thirty or forty years before. 

206' 



UNFKIENDLY CKITICISM 

What made it harder to endure suggestion of this sort 
was that in his feeling of always breaking new ground 
there was an inner sense, or fear, or doubt, that perhaps 
it was not really virgin soil he was turning up, but 
merely the sod of fields which had lain fallow a year 
or two or had possibly been cropped the season before. 

The misgiving was forced upon him by certain ap- 
pearances in the work of other veteran authors. When 
he took up the last book of some lifelong favorite, no 
matter how great a master he knew him still to be, he 
could not help seeing that the poor old master was re- 
peating himself, though he would not have phrased the 
case in such brutal terms. Then the chill wonder how 
long he could hope to escape the like fate pierced him, 
and for a moment he could not silence the question 
whether it might not have already befallen him. In 
another moment he knew better, and was justly ag- 
grieved with the next reviewer who took things in him 
for granted, quite as offensively if they were merits 
as if they were defects. It was vital to him to be al- 
ways breaking new ground, and, if at times it seemed to 
him that he had turned this or that furrow before, he 
said to himself that it was merely one of those intima- 
tions of pre-existence which are always teasing us here 
with the sense of experience in circumstances absolutely 
novel; and he hoped that no one else would notice the 
coincidence. 

He was, indeed, tolerably safe from the chance, for 
it is one of the conditions of literary criticism that the 
reviewers shall be nearly always young persons. They, 
if they alone are capable of the cruelties they some- 
times practise, are alone capable of the enthusiasms 
which supply publishers with quotable passages for 
their advertisements, and which lift authors' hearts in 
pride and joy. It is to their advantage that they gen- 
20 297 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

erally bring to the present work of a veteran author 
an ignorance of all that he has done before, and have 
the zest for it which the performance of a novice in- 
spires. They know he is not a novice, of course, and 
they recognize his book as that of a veteran, but they 
necessarily treat it as representative of his authorship. 
Of course, if it is his twentieth or thirtieth book, or 
his fortieth or fiftieth, it is merely one of a long series 
which fully represents him. Even these collectively 
represent him inadequately as long as he is adding to 
them, if he has the habit, like Eugenio, of always 
breaking new ground. The reviewer, however, is prob- 
ably much newer than the ground which the estab- 
lished author breaks in his last book, and, coming to 
it in his generous ignorance, which he has to conceal 
under a mask of smiling omniscience, he condemns or 
praises it without reference to the work which has gone 
before it and which it is merely part of, though of 
course it has entirety enough of a sort to stand alone. 
If the author has broken ground in the direction of a 
new type of heroine, the reviewer, by the conditions of 
his calling, is all but obliged to say that here is one 
of those enchanting girls whom the author in question 
has endeared to generations of readers ; or one of those 
tedious prudes for whom his name is a synonyme. If, 
after many psychological romances, the author has 
stepped down to the level of actual life, he is praised 
or blamed for the vital or servile naturalism of his 
work; or if the contrary is the case, he has to read of 
himself as doing something habitual and entirely char- 
acteristic of him. In vain, so far as that acute young 
critic is concerned, has he broken new ground. But if 
he has with much compunction consciously turned his 
furrows in a field tilled before, he stands a fair chance 

of being hailed at the outset of a new career. 

298 



UNPKIENDLY CEITICISM 

He cannot openly complain, and if he conld the critic 
cannot help being what he is. If the critic were older 
and more versed in the veteran author, he might not 
like him so well, and he could not, at any rate, bring 
the fresh interest to his work which the young reviewer 
brings. What Eugenio would really wish would be to 
have each successive book of his given for review to 
some lifelong admirer, some dear and faithful friend, 
all the better for not being an acquaintance, who had 
liked him from the beginning and was intimately versed 
in all his work. Such a critic would know that Eu- 
genio was always breaking new ground, and that he was 
never more true to this inherent tendency than when 
he seemed to be ploughing the same old furrows in the 
same old fields. Such a critic would be alert to detect 
those fine differences of situation which distinguish a 
later from an earlier predicament. He would note with 
unfailing perspicacity the shades of variance which con- 
stitute Elorindo an essentially novel character when 
presented under the name of Lindoro, or Eloribella a 
fresh delight when she reappears as Doralinda. Even 
when he could not deny that these persons were in them- 
selves one and the same, he would be able to make the 
reader observe that the new light thrown upon them by 
the author's ever-renascent art revealed in familiar crea- 
tions traits of mind and charms of spirit unimagined 
before. He would insist that, if not new, they were 
newer, because being more fully ascertained they were 
truer. He would boldly recur to the personages in 
Eugenio's former books whom they reminded one of, 
and, studying them in contrast, would convince the 
reader that the increasing purpose of the author in 
the treatment of the well-known types had been to re- 
veal the infinite variety of character which lay hid in 
each and every human type. 

^299 



IMAGINAKY INTEKVIEWS 

Some such reviewer, Eugenic- thought, all journals 
pretending to literary authority ought to keep on their 
staff for the comfort of veteran authors and for the 
dispensation of that more delicate and sympathetic 
justice which their case required. It might be well 
enough to use a pair of ordinary steelyards, or even 
hay- scales, in weighing out the rewards and punish- 
ments of younger authors, but some such sensitive bal- 
ance as only the sympathetic nerves of equal years, and, 
if possible, equal intelligence, could adjust ought to be 
used in ascertaining the merits of a veteran author. 

In his frankest self-consciousness, Eugenio did not 
say a veteran author like himself, and he did not insist 
exclusively upon a veteran critic for his behoof. There 
were times when he thought that a young critic, coming 
in the glow of adolescence and the freshness of knowl- 
edge won from the recent study of all his works, might 
be better fitted to appreciate the qualities of the latest. 
He quite rejected the notion, when it came to business, 
with which he had sometimes played, of an author re- 
viewing his own books, and this apart from his sense of 
its immodesty. In the course of his experience he had 
known of but one really great author who had done 
this, and then had done it upon the invitation of an 
editor of rare if somewhat wilful perspicacity, who in- 
vited the author to do it on the ground that no one else 
could do it so well. But though he would not have 
liked to be his own reviewer, because it was not seemly, 
he chiefly feared that if put upon his honor, as he 
would be in such a case, he must deal with his work 
so damagingly as to leave little or nothing of it. He 
might make the reputation of a great critic, but in do- 
ing execution upon his own shortcomings he might be 
the means of destroying himself as a great author. 

After all, authors are not the self-satisfied generation 
300 



UNFRIENDLY CRITICISM 

they must often seem to the public which has tried to 
spoil them with praise. There is much in doing a 
thing which makes a man modest in regard to the way 
he has done it. Even if he knows that he has done it 
well, if the testimony of all his faculties is to that ef- 
fect, there is somehow- the lurking sense that it was not 
he who really did it, but that there is a power, to turn 
Matthew Arnold's phrase to our use, " not ourselves, 
that works for " beauty as well as righteousness, and 
that it was this mystical force which wrought through 
him to the exquisite result. If you come to the second- 
best results, to the gold so alloyed that you may con- 
fidently stamp it your own, do you wish to proclaim it 
the precious metal without alloy ? Do you wish to de- 
clare that it is to all intents and purposes quite as good 
as pure gold, or even better? Do you hold yourself 
quit of the duty of saying that it is second-best, that it 
is something mixed with copper or nickel, and of the 
value of oroide, say? You cannot bring yourself to 
this extreme of candor, and what right, then, have you 
to recognize that something else is fine gold when it 
is really so? Ought not you to feign that it is only 
about thirteen carats when it is actually eighteen? 

Considerations like these always stayed Eugenio 
when it came to the point of deciding whether he would 
care to be his own reviewer, but the desire to be ade- 
quately reviewed still remained with him, a fond long- 
ing amid repeated disappointments. An author often 
feels that he has got too much praise, though he never 
has got all he wants. " Why don't they clap ?" Doctor 
Holmes once whimsically demanded, speaking of his 
audiences in those simple early days when he went 
about lecturing like Emerson and Alcott and other 
saints and sages of New England. " Do they think I 
can't stand it? Why don't they give me three times 

301 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

three? I can stand it very well." An author may 
sometimes think he is fulsomely praised and may even 
feel a sort of disgust for the slab adulation trowelled 
upon him, but his admirer need not fear being accused 
of insincerity. He may confidently count upon being 
regarded as a fine fellow who has at worst gone wrong 
in the right direction. It ought, therefore, to be a very 
simple matter to content a veteran author in the article 
of criticism, but somehow it is not. 

Perhaps the trouble is in the nature of criticism, 
which, unwillingly enough, no doubt, assumes to be and 
to do more than it can. Its convention is that it is an 
examination of a book and a report upon its qualities. 
But it is not such a report, and it cannot be in the 
limits assigned it, which are the only tolerable limits 
with the reader. The author would not mind if the 
critic's report were physically commensurate with his 
book; but, of course, the reader could not stand that; 
and, generous as' they are, other authors might com- 
plain. Sometimes, as it is, they think that any one of 
their number who gets something like a good report 
from a critic is getting more than his deserts. Yet au- 
thors, though a difficult, are not an impossible genera- 
tion. Few of them would allow that they are even un- 
reasonable with regard to criticism, and they would 
probably hail any improvement in its theories and meth- 
ods with gratitude. 

As criticism cannot be an adequate report upon the 
qualities of a book, even a book which has not been 
examined, why should it assume to do more than talk 
about it and talk all the better for being merely tenta- 
tive and altogether unfinal ? Nobody can really be au- 
thoritative concerning anything, for there is no one 
whose wisdom will not be disputed by others of the 
wise. The best way, then, might be for a reviewer to 

302 



UNFRIENDLY CRITICISM 

go round collecting sentiment and opinion about the 
book be means to talk of, and then to give as many 
qualifying varieties of impression as the general un- 
bandsomeness of human nature will allow him to give 
when they differ from his own impression. On the 
terms of the old and still accepted convention of criti- 
cism, Eugenio had himself done a vast deal of review- 
ing, an amount of it, in fact, that be could not consider 
without amaze, and in all this reviewing be had not 
once satisfied himself with his work. Never once had 
be written a criticism which seemed to him adequate, 
or more than an approximation to justice, even when 
he had most carefully, almost prayerfully, examined 
the work he reported upon. He was aware of writing 
from this mood or that, of feeling hampered by editorial 
conditions, of becoming impatient or jaded, and finally 
employing the hay-scales when be ought to have used 
the delicate balances with which one weighs out life- 
giving elixirs or deadly poisons. But he used to im- 
agine that if he could have put himself in the attitude 
of easy discussion or light comment, instead of the 
judicial pose he felt obliged to take, be could have ad- 
ministered a far finer and more generous measure of 
justice. In these moments he used to wonder whether 
something stated and organized in the way of intelli- 
gent talk about books might not be substituted for the 
conventional verdicts and sentences of the courts of 
criticism. 

In this notion be proceeded upon a principle evolved 
from bis own experience in fields far from the flinty 
and sterile ranges of criticism. He had not only done 
much reviewing in those days, but be bad already writ- 
ten much in the kinds which he could not, in his 
modesty, bring himself to call " creative," though be 
did not mind others calling it so. Whatever bad been 

303 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

the shortcomings of the conventional reports upon his 
work, it was his glad experience that nothing he said 
or meant, not the slightest intention or airiest intima- 
tion in his books, was ever wholly lost. Somewhere, 
some one, somehow had caught it, liked it, remembered 
it, and had by a happy inspiration written him of it, 
it might be diffident, it might be confident, of his pleas- 
ure in the recognition. 

Such recognition was always more precious than the 
reports of the conventional critics, though if these were 
favorable the author was glad of them, as of any good 
that the gods gave. But what struck Eugenio was 
that such recognition was the real, the very, the vital 
criticism, and that if it could be evoked in behalf of 
others, in its sincerity, it might be helpful to the cause 
of literature far beyond anything that the courts of 
criticism could do or effect in its behalf. After all, as 
he said to himself, an author wrote for his readers and 
not for his critics, for pleasure and not for judgment; 
and if he could be assured publicly, as he sometimes 
was assured privately, that nothing he did was lost, he 
might be encouraged to keep on doing his best. Why, 
indeed, should not there be a critical journal embody- 
ing in a species of fragrant bouquet the flowers of 
thought and emotion springing up in the brains and 
bosoms of readers responsive to the influence of a new 
book % Such readers would have only to suppose them- 
selves addressing the author direct, and the thing could 
be done. It might be done in another way by the au- 
thors contributing the praises privately sent him. In 
a time when personal letters to authors are constantly 
quoted in advertisements, this might not seem so im- 
modest as in some earlier literary condition. 

In the mean time the question of what shall be done 
for veteran authors who are always breaking new 

304 



UNFRIENDLY CRITICISM 

ground still remains, and it is complicated by a fact 
of psychological import for the reader as well as the 
anthor. What first gives an author his hold upon the 
reader is not the novelty of his theme, but a pleasing, 
it may be a painfully pleasing, quality which in its pe- 
culiar variation must be called his personal quality. It 
is the sense of this in each of his successive books which 
deepens his hold upon the reader, and not the style, or 
the characters, or the intrigue. As long as this personal 
quality delights, he is new whether he breaks new 
ground or not, or he is newly welcome. With his own 
generation, with the readers who began young with him 
and have grown old with him, he is always safe. But 
there is danger for him with the readers who begin 
young with him after he has grown old. It is they 
who find his tales twice told and himself hackneyed, 
unless they have been trained to like his personal 
quality by their elders. This might be difficult, but 
it is not impossible, and ought not it to be the glad, 
the grateful care of such elders ? 



VI 

THE FICKLENESS OF AGE 

All forms of literature probably hold a great deal 
more meaning than people commonly get out of them; 
but prose may be likened to a cup which one can easily 
see to the bottom of, though it is often deeper and fuller 
than it looks; while verse is the fount through which 
thought and feeling continually bubble from the heart 
of things. The sources that underlie all life may be 
finding vent in a rhyme where the poet imagined he was 
breathing some little, superficial vein of his own; but 
in the reader he may unawares have reached the wells 
of inmost passion and given them release. The reader 
may himself live with a certain verse and be aware of 
it now and then merely as a teasing iterance that 

" From some odd corner of the mind 
Beats time to nothing in the brain." 

But suddenly some experience, or perhaps the exfolia- 
tion of the outer self through the falling away of the 
withered years, shall open to him its vital and cosmical 
significance. He shall know then that it is not an idle 
whisper of song, but a message to his soul from the 
senate where the immortals gather in secular counsel 
and muse the wisdom of all the centuries since hu- 
manity came to its earliest consciousness. The bearer 
of the message mav not have known it in the translation 

306 



THE FICKLENESS OF AGE 

which it wears to the receiver; each must read it in 
his own tongue and read meaning into it; perhaps it 
always takes two to make a poet, and singer and listener 
are the twin spheres that form one star. 

A valued correspondent of ours, one of those whose 
letters are oftener than we should like to own fraught 
with the suggestion of our most fortunate inspirations, 
believes himself to have been recently the confidant of 
the inner sense of certain lines in a familiar poem of 
Longfellow's. Its refrain had, from the first reading, 
chanted in the outer chamber of his ear, but suddenly, 
the other day, it sang to his soul with a newly realized 
purport in the words, 

" A boy's will is the wind's will, 
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." 

The words are, as the poet promptly declares, the bur- 
den of a Lapland song, which " is haunting his memory 
still," which " murmurs and whispers still," which " is 
singing and saying still," which " is mournful " and 
" sweet" and " fitful " and "fatal" and " strange " 
and " beautiful." Yet he seems not to have known, as 
our friend now thinks he himself knows, that they ex- 
press a difference, unrecognized hitherto, between youth 
and age, and rightfully attribute to the young a stead- 
fastness and persistence in objects and ideals formerly 
supposed the distinguishing qualities of the old. In 
other words, they have precipitated into his conscious- 
ness a truth unwittingly held in solution by both the 
poets in their verse. Or, if it was conveyed to him by 
their sensible connivance, he is the first who has been 
made its repositary. Or, if he cannot claim an exclusive 
property in the revelation, it is now his, in his turn, 
by that sad right of seniority whose advantages are not 
ours till there are few or none left to contest them with 

307 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

us. One has not been promoted to them because of any 
merit or achievement ; one has simply lived into them ; 
and how much of one has died in the process of sur- 
vival! The lines speak to our friend's age a language 
which his youth could not have understood, and it is 
because he is no longer young that he perceives how 
long the thoughts of youth were and how brief the 
thoughts of age. 

He had always fancied that his later years should be 
a time of repose in the faiths, loves, and joys through 
which he realized himself. But nothing apparently 
was farther from the fact. Such length of thoughts 
as he had, such abiding pleasures, such persistent 
hopes, were from his youth; and the later sort were 
as the leaves of the tree to the tree itself. He put 
them forth at the beginning of an epoch, a season, and 
they dropped from him at the close. In as great bit- 
terness as is consonant with his temperament he has 
asked us why youth should ever have been deemed fickle 
and age constant when so precisely the contrary is true. 
Youth, he owns, is indeed full of vain endeavors and of 
enterprises that come to nothing, but it is far more fixed 
than age in its aspirations. His aspirations change now 
with such rapidity that they seem different not only 
from year to year, but from month to month, from 
day to day. He has not merely discarded his old ideals, 
he loathes them. He used to like going out to dinner, 
above all things; and he was fond of lunches, even of 
afternoon teas; but in a day, in an hour, such delights 
became wearinesses and vexations of spirit. Formerly 
he enjoyed travel with all its necessary concomitants. 
It amused him to check his baggage and depart from 
stations, to arrive at hotels and settle himself in new 
rooms; the very domiciliation in sleeping-cars or the 
domestication in diners had a charm which was appar- 

308 



THE FICKLENESS OF AGE 

ently perennial ; a trip in a river-boat was rapture ; an 
ocean voyage was ecstasy. The succession of strange 
faces, new minds, was an unfailing interest, and there 
was no occurrence, in or out of the ordinary, which did 
not give him release from self and form a true recrea- 
tion. The theatre does not amuse him now, though the 
time has been, and lately, for the curtain, when it rose 
on a play, new or old, to lift his spirit with it and to 
hold him entranced till its fall. As for the circus, he 
once rejoiced in all its feats; performing elephants 
could not bore him, nor acts of horsemanship stale its 
infinite variety. But the time has come abruptly when 
the smell of the sawdust, or the odor of the trodden 
weed, mixed with the aroma of ice-cold lemonade, is a 
stench in his nostrils. 

These changes of ideal have occurred, not through 
the failure of any powers that he can note in himself, 
but as part of the great change from youth to age, which 
he thinks is far greater morally than physically. He 
is still fairly strong; he has not lost his appetite or 
the teeth to gratify it; he can walk his miles, always 
rather two than ten, and rest refreshed from them; 
except that he does not like to kill things, he could 
trudge the whole day through fields and woods with his 
gun on his shoulder ; though he does not golf, and can- 
not know whether or no it would bore him, he likes to 
wield the axe and the scythe in the groves and meadows 
of his summer place. When he stretches himself on the 
breast of the mother alike of flesh and grass, it is with 
a delicious sense of her restorative powers and no fear 
of rheumatism. If he rests a little longer than he once 
used, he is much more rested when he rises from his 
repose. 

His body rejoices still in its experiences, but not his 
soul : it is not interested ; it does not care to have known 

309 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

its experiences or wish to repeat them. For this reason 
he thinks that it is his spirit which is superannuated, 
while its " muddy vesture of decay " is in very tolerable 
repair. His natural man is still comparatively young, 
and lives on in the long, long thoughts of youth; but 
his supernatural man has aged, with certain moral ef- 
fects which alarm his doubts of the pleasures he once 
predicated of eternity. "If it is going to be like this 
with me!" he says to himself, and shrinks from sup- 
plying the responsive clause of his conditional. 

But mainly his mind turns upon itself in contempla- 
tion of its earthly metamorphoses, in which it hardly 
knows itself for the mind of the same man. Its ap- 
prehensions are for the time when, having exhausted 
all the differences, it shall care for none; but mean- 
while it is interested in noting the absurdity of that 
conventional view of age as the period of fixed ideals. 
It may be the period of fixed habits, of those helpless 
iterances which imply no intentions or purposes ; but it 
is not the period in which the mind continues in this 
or that desire and strives for its fulfilment. The same 
poet who sang at second hand those words of the Lap- 
land song, 

" The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts/' 

erred, to our friend's sense, in singing of 

" The young heart hot and restless, 
And the old subdued and slow." 

He believes the reverse would rightly characterize the 
heart of youth and the heart of age. Age is not slow 
in its mental motions; it is hurried and anxious, with 
that awful mystical apprehension of the swift-coming 
moment when time shall be no more and nothing but 
eternity shall be left. It is not subdued; its heart is 

310 



THE FICKLENESS OF AGE 

hot with rebellion against the inevitable. But for youth 
there is no inevitable; there is no conclusion, no catas- 
trophe, which it may not hope to escape; and, so it is 
patient of chances, it is glad of them. Its heart is not 
restless ; it is quite at peace in the bosom which is secure 
of all the time there is. 

Our friend believes that a variety of popular super- 
stitions will fall at the recognition of the truth in this 
matter, and none more finally than that which attributes 
to the junior partner the unhappiness of those marriages 
in which youth and crabbed age try to live together. 
In such hazardous unions the junior partner is, for 
some unexplained reason, of the sex which has the re- 
pute of a generic fickleness as well as the supposed 
volatility of its fewer years. Probably repute wrongs 
it as much in one respect as in the other, but our friend 
contends only for greater justice to it in the last. In 
the light that he has come into, he holds that where such 
unions are unhappy, though they may have been formed 
with a fair appearance of affection, it is the senior part- 
ner who is to blame if blame may ever be attached to 
involuntary change. It is the senior partner who has 
wearied first of the companionship and wished for re- 
lease with the impatience natural to age. This is in- 
tolerant of the annoyances which seem inherent in every 
union of the kind, and impatient of those differences 
of temperament which tell far more than any dispari- 
ties of age, and which exist even where there are no 
such disparities. The intolerance, the impatience, is 
not more characteristic of the husband where he is the 
elder than of the wife in the much fewer instances of 
her seniority. In the unions where two old people join 
their faltering destinies, the risks of unhappiness are, 
logically, doubled; and our friend holds it a grotesque 
folly to expect anything else of marriages in which two 

311 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

lovers, disappointed of each other in their youth, at- 
tempt to repair the loss in their age. Where any such 
survive into later life, with the passion of earlier life 
still rife in their hearts, he argues that they had much 
better remain as they are, for in such a belated union 
as they aspire to the chances are overwhelmingly against 
them. 

Very probably, like other discoverers, he is too much 
impressed with the value of his divination. It is some- 
thing that, at any rate, can appeal for recognition only 
to the aged or the aging. With these we could imagine 
it bringing a certain consolation, a relief from vain 
regret, an acquittal from self-accusation. If one has 
suddenly changed for no apparent reason, one must 
be glad to find a reason in the constitution of things, 
and to attribute one's fickleness to one's time of life. 
Youth's errors have possibly been too much condoned 
upon grounds where age could more justly base its de- 
fence. It may be more reckless than age, but it is not 
nearly so rash. It keeps thinking its long, long thoughts 
and questioning the conclusions to which age eagerly 
hobbles or hurls itself from its crutches. Youth is de- 
liberate, for it has plenty of time, while, as our friend 
notes, age has little but eternity before it. Not youth, 
but age, leaps from life's trolley while it is still in mo- 
tion, or, after mismeasuring the time and space, limps 
impatiently before it and is rolled under its fender. 
You may see physical proof of this difference, our friend 
insists, in the behavior of two people, one young and 
one old, at any street-crossing ; and why should so many 
old ladies fall on the stairs, but that they are apt 
to precipitate themselves wildly from landings where 
young girls linger to dream yet one dream more be- 
fore they glide slowly down to greet the young men 

who would willingly wait years for them ? 

312 



THE FICKLENESS OF AGE 

The distrust of eternity a* which our friend hints 
is perhaps the painfulest of his newly discovered dif- 
ferences between youth and age. Resting so serenely 
as it does in practically unlimited time, with ideals 
and desires which scarcely vary from year to year, 
youth has no fears of infinity. It is not afraid but it 
shall have abundant occupation in the aeons before it, 
or that its emotions or volitions shall first be exhausted. 
Its blithe notion of immortality is that it is immortal 
youth. It has no conception of age, and could not im- 
agine an eternity of accomplished facts. It is, perhaps, 
for this reason that doubt of immortality never really 
comes to youth. One of the few things which our 
friend still believes is that every sceptic who deals 
honestly with his only history must be aware of an hour, 
almost a moment, of waning youth, when the vague 
potentiality of disbelief became a living doubt, thence- 
forward to abide with him till death resolve it. End- 
less not-being is unthinkable before that time, as after 
it endless being is unthinkable. Yet this unthinkable 
endless being is all that is left to age, and it is in the 
notion of it alone that age can get back to the long, 
long thoughts in which is surcease from unrest. Our 
old friend may accuse us of proposing the most impos- 
sible of paradoxes when we invite him to take refuge 
from his whirling ideals, not in an unavailing endeavor 
to renew the conditions of youth in time, but in the 
forecast of youth in eternity. We think that the 
error of his impatience, his despair with the state he 
has come to here, is largely if not wholly through 
his failure to realize that he is not going to wake up 
old in some other being, but young, and that the capacity 
of long, long thoughts will be renewed in him with the 
renewal of his life. The restlessness of age, its fickle- 
ness, its volatility, is the expression of immense fatigue. 
21 313 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

It tosses from side to side and tries for this and that- 
like a sick man from sheer weakness ; or, rather, if the 
reader prefers another image, it is like some hapless 
wild thing caught by rising floods on a height of land 
which they must soon submerge, and running incessant- 
ly hither and thither as the water more narrowly hems 
it in. 

Undoubtedly the mutability of age in its ideals has 
been increased of late by the restriction of human hope 
to the years which remain, few and brief to the longest 
earthly life, by the sciences which provisionally darken 
counsel. When these shall have penetrated to a point 
where they can discern the light, they will " pour the 
day " on the dim orbs of age and illumine the future 
with new hope. Then doubting age can enter into the 
rest now forbidden it and take its repose between il- 
limitable horizons in the long, long thoughts of eternal 
youth. We speak here in behalf of the sceptic, the ag- 
nostic few. For the many who have not lost their 
hope because they have never lost their faith, doubtless 
all the trouble of change which disquiets our friend will 
seem something temperamental merely, and not some- 
thing essential or inseparable from human nature. 
Their thoughts have remained long, their ideals stead- 
fast, because they have not lost the most precious jewel 
of their youth — the star of trust and hope which 

" Flames in the forehead of the morning sky." 

These are the most enviable of their kind, and there 
are signs that their turn may be coming once more in 
the primacy to which their numbers have always en- 
titled them. Only the other day we were reading a 
paper by a man of that science which deals with life on 
strictly physical lines, and drawing from it an immense 
consolation because it reaffirmed that the soul has not 

314 



THE FICKLENESS OF AGE 

only its old excuse for being in the unthinkability of 
an automatic universe and the necessity of an inten- 
tional first cause, but with Evolution, in the regard of 
some scientists, tottering on its throne, and Natural 
Selection entering the twilight into which the elder 
pagan deities have vanished, is newly warranted in 
claiming existence as that indestructible life-property 
or organizing power which characterizes kind through 
kind from everlasting to everlasting. In this consola- 
tion we seemed well on our way back to the encounter 
of a human spirit such as used to be rapt to heaven or 
cast into hell for very disproportionate merits or de- 
merits; but we were supported for the meeting by the 
probability that in the fortunate event the spirit would 
be found issuing from all the clouds of superstition, 
and when it was reconstituted in the universal belief, 
that the time, with eternity in its train, would have 
returned for fitly hailing it in the apostrophe of the 
Addisonian Cato: 

"But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth, 
Unhurt amidst the war of elements, 
The wreck of matter, and the crush of worlds." 



VII 

THE RENEWAL OF INSPIRATION 

There comes a time in the experience of perhaps 
every stated purveyor of intellectual food when the 
stock he has long been drawing upon seems finally ex- 
hausted. There is not a grain left in the barns where 
he had garnered up the harvests of the past; there is 
not a head of wheat to be found in the fields where he 
had always been able to glean something; if he shakes 
the tree of knowledge in the hope of a nut to crack 
or a frozen-thaw to munch, nothing comes down but 
a shower of withered leaves. His condition is what, in 
the parlance of his vocation, he calls being out of a 
subject, and it is what may happen to him equally 
whether he is preaching twice a Sunday from the pul- 
pit, or writing leaders every day for a prominent jour- 
nal, or merely contributing a monthly essay to a maga- 
zine. As the day or hour or moment approaches when 
he must give forth something from his destitution, he 
envies the hungriest of his auditors or readers who do 
not yet know that there is nothing in him to appease 
their famine. There is only the barren will to give 
which only a miracle can transform into a vitalizing 
bounty. 

Yet is not this miracle always wrought ? When did 
a pulpit ever fail of a sermon, or a journal of a lead- 
ing article, or a magazine of its stated essay ? The fact 

316 



THE RENEWAL OF INSPIRATION 

might argue the very contrary of the appearance and 
convince the desperate purveyor that what he mistook 
for hopeless need was choice which mocked him with a 
myriad alternatives. From cover to cover the Scripture 
is full of texts; every day brings forth its increase of 
incident; the moral and social and sesthetical world is 
open on every side to polite inquiry and teems with 
inspiring suggestion. If ever the preacher or editor 
or essayist fancies he has exhausted these resources, he 
may well pause and ask whether it is not himself that 
he has exhausted. There may be wanting the eye to 
see the riches which lie near or far, rather than the 
riches which are always inviting the eye. 

A curious trait of the psychology of this matter is 
that it is oftener the young eye than the old which lacks 
the visual force. When Eugenio was beginning author 
and used to talk with other adolescent immortals of the 
joyful and sorrowful mysteries of their high calling, 
the dearth of subjects was the cause of much misgiving 
and even despair Linong them. Upon a certain occasion 
one of that divine company, so much diviner than any 
of the sort now, made bold to affirm : " I feel that I 
have got my technique perfect. I believe that my poetic 
art will stand the test of any experiment in the hand- 
ling of verse, and now all that I want is a subject." It 
seemed a great hardship to the others, and they felt 
it the more keenly because every one of them was more 
or less in the same case. They might have none of 
them so frankly owned their fitness for their work as 
the one who had spoken, but they were all as deeply 
aware of it: and if any subject had appeared above the 
horizon there could have been no question among them 
except as to which should first mount his winged steed 
and ride it down. It did not occur to any of them 
that the want of a subject was the defect of their art, 

317 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

and that until they were equipped with the eye that 
never fails to see occasion for song all round the heavens 
they were not yet the champions of poetry which they 
fancied themselves. He who had uttered their common 
belief sufficiently proved afterward, in the range of 
things he did, that he had ultimately come into pos- 
session of the highest of the poetic gifts, the poetic 
vision of life, and that he had completed his art at a 
point where it had been most imperfect before, when 
he supposed it so perfect. As soon as he ceased looking 
for subjects, which were mainly the conventional themes 
of verse, the real and vital subjects began looking for 
him. 

Eugenio himself, on his lower level, had something 
of the same experience. When he first began those 
inventions in prose which long seemed to him worthy 
of the best that his kindest friends said of them, he 
had great trouble in contriving facts sufficiently won- 
derful for the characters who were to deal with them, 
and characters high and noble enough to deal with the 
great and exalted facts. On one hand or the other his 
scheme was always giving out. The mirage of fancy 
which painted itself so alluringly before him faded on 
his advance and left him planted heavy-footed in the 
desert sands. In other words, he was always getting 
out of a subject. In the intervals between his last 
fiction and his next, when his friends supposed he was 
purposely letting his mind lie fallow (and perhaps will- 
ingly acquiesced in the rest they were sharing with 
him), he was really in an anguish of inquiry for some- 
thing on which to employ his powers ; he was in a state 
of excruciating activity of which the incessant agitation 
of the atoms in the physical world is but a faint image ; 
his repose was the mask of violent vibrations, of vol- 
canic emotions, which required months to clear them- 

318 



THE RENEWAL OF INSPIRATION 

selves in the realization of some ideal altogether dis- 
proportioned to the expenditure of energy which had 
been tacitly taking place. At these periods it seemed 
to him that his lot had been cast in a world where he 
was himself about the only interesting fact, and from 
which every attractive subject had been removed before 
he came into it. 

He could never tell just how or when all this changed, 
and a little ray, very faint and thin at first, stole in 
upon his darkness and broadened to an effulgence which 
showed his narrow circle a boundless universe thronged 
with the most available passions, interests, motives, 
situations, catastrophes and denouements, and charac- 
ters eagerly fitting themselves with the most appropriate 
circumstances. As nearly as he could make out, his 
liberation to this delightful cosmos took place through 
his gradual perception that human nature was of a 
vast equality in the important things, and had its dif- 
ference only in trifles. He had but to take other men 
in the same liberal spirit that he took himself to find 
them all heroes ; he had but to take women at their own 
estimate to find them all heroines, if not divinely beau- 
tiful, then interesting, fascinating, irresistibly better 
than beautiful. The situation was something like this; 
it will not do to give away his whole secret ; but the read- 
er needs only a hint in order to understand how in his 
new mind Eugenio was overwhelmed with subjects. 

After this illumination of his the only anxiety he 
had was concerning his ability to produce all the master- 
pieces he felt himself capable of in the short time al- 
lotted to the longest-lived writer. He was aware of a 
duty to the material he had discovered, and this indeed 
sometimes weighed upon him. However, he took cour- 
age from the hope that others would seize his point of 
view and be able to carry on the work of producing 

319 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

masterpieces indefinitely. They could never use up all 
the subjects, any more than men can exhaust the ele- 
ments of the aluminium which abound in every piece 
of the common earth; but, in their constant reliance 
upon every-day life as the true and only source of sur- 
prise and delight in art, they could never be in the 
terrible despair which had afflicted him from time to 
time before his illumination. 

Doubtless there is an overruling Providence in this 
matter which we may not distrust without accusing the 
order which has not yet failed in the due succession of 
the seasons and the days and nights. While we are 
saying it is never going to rain, it rains; or when it 
seems as if nature were finally frozen up, a thaw be- 
gins; when we feel that the dark will not end, the 
dawn is already streaking the east. If the preacher 
thinks that the old texts are no longer applicable to 
life, there is suddenly reported an outbreak of vice in 
the city which puts him in mind of Sodom and Gomor- 
rah; or the opportune flight of a defaulter furnishes 
material for a homily which searches the consciences 
of half the congregation with the words of the com- 
mandment against stealing. The journalist wakes in 
heavy-eyed despair, but he finds from the papers on his 
breakfast-table that there has been a revolution in South 
America, or that the Socialists have been doing some- 
thing in Belgium almost too bad even for Socialists 
as the capitalists imagine them, and his heart rises 
again. Even the poor magazine essayist, who has lived 
through the long month in dread of the hour when his 
copy shall be due, is not forbidden his reprieve. He 
may not have anything to say, but he certainly has 
something to say it about. The world is always as inter- 
esting to-day as it was yesterday, and probably to- 
morrow will not be so dull as it promises. 

320 



THE RENEWAL OF INSPIRATION 

One reason for the disability of the essayist, as dis- 
tinguished from the preacher or the journalist, is that 
he does not give himself range enough. Expecting to 
keep scrupulously to one subject, he cannot put his 
hand on a theme which he is sure will hold out under 
him to the end. Once it was not so. The essayists of 
antiquity were the most vagariously garrulous people 
imaginable. There was not one of them who, to our 
small acquaintance with them, kept to his proposition 
or ended anywhere in sight of it. Aristotle, Epictetus, 
Marcus Aurelius, Plutarch, they talk of anything but 
the matter in hand, after mentioning it; and when 
you come down to the moderns, for instance, to such 
a modern as Montaigne, you find him wandering all 
over the place. He has no sooner stated his subject 
than he begins to talk about something else ; it reminds 
him (like Lincoln) of a story which has nothing to do 
with it; and that story reminds him of another, and so 
on, till the original thesis is left flapping in the breeze 
somewhere at the vanishing-point in the tortuous per- 
spective and vainly signalling the essayist back. It 
was the same, or nearly the same, with the English 
essayists quite down to the beginning of the last century, 
when they began to cease being. The writers in the 
Spectator, the Guardian, the Tatler, the Rambler, and 
the rest, contrived to keep a loose allegiance to the 
stated topic, because they treated it so very briefly, and 
were explicitly off to something else in the next page 
or two with a fresh text. But if we come to such de- 
lightful masters of the art as Lamb and Leigh Hunt 
and De Quincey and Hazlitt, it will not be easy, open- 
ing at any chance point, to make out what they are 
talking about. They are apparently talking about 
everything else in the world but the business they 
started with. But they are always talking delight- 

321 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

fully, and that is the great matter with any sort of 
talker. 

When the reviewers began to supplant the essayists, 
they were even more contemptuously indifferent to the 
obligations of constancy. Their text was nominally 
some book, but almost as soon as they had named it 
they shut it and went off on the subject of it, perhaps, 
or perhaps not. It was for the most part lucky for the 
author that they did so, for their main affair with the 
author was to cuff him soundly for his ignorance and 
impudence, and then leave him and not return to him 
except for a few supplementary cuffs at the close, just 
to show that they had not forgotten him. Macaulay 
was a notorious offender in this sort ; though why do we 
say offender ? Was not he always delightful \ He was 
and he is, though we no longer think him a fine critic ; 
and he meant to be just, or as just as any one could be 
with a man whom one differed from in the early Vic- 
torian period. 

But Macaulay certainly did not keep harking back 
to his text, if ever he returned to it at all. His instinct 
was that a preacher's concern was with his text, but not 
an essayist's or a reviewer's, and he was right enough. 
The essayist certainly has no such obligation or neces- 
sity. His reader can leave him at any moment, unless 
he is very interesting, and it does not matter where they 
j)art company. In fact, it might be argued that the 
modern fidelity to its subject is one of the chief evi- 
dences or causes of the essay's decay. The essayist tries 
to make a mechanical conscience perform the duty of 
that fine spiritual freedom in which the essay once had 
its highest effect with the reader, and in his dull loyalty 
to the stated thesis he is superficial as well as tiresome. 

The true subject is not one subject only, but many. 
It is like that pungent bulb whose odorous energy in- 

322 



THE EENEWAL OF INSPIRATION 

creases with exfoliation, and remains a potent fragrance 
in the air after the bulb has substantially ceased to be 
under the fingers. The error of the modern essayist is 
to suppose that he can ever have a single subject in 
hand; he has a score, he has a hundred, as his elders 
and betters all know ; and what he mistakes for his desti- 
tution is really his superfluity. If he will be honest (as 
he may with difficulty be), must not he recognize that 
what seems a search for one theme is a hesitation be- 
tween many pressing forward for his choice? If he 
will make this admission we believe he will be nearer 
the fact, and he will be a much more respectable figure 
than he could feel himself in blindly fumbling about 
for a single thesis. Life is never, and in nothing, the 
famine, perhaps, that we imagine it. Much more prob- 
ably it is a surfeit, and what we suppose are the pangs 
of hunger are really the miseries of repletion. More 
people are suffering from too much than from too lit- 
tle. Especially are the good things here in a demoraliz- 
ing profusion. Ask any large employer of labor, and he 
will tell you that what ails the working-classes is an 
excess of pianos and buggies and opera-boxes. Ask any 
workman what ails his employer, and he will say that 
it is the ownership of the earth, with a mortgage on 
planetary space. Both are probably right, or at least 
one is as right as the other. 

When we have with difficulty made our selection from 
the divine redundancy of the ideal world, and so far 
as we could have reduced ourselves to the penury of a 
sole possession, why do not we turn our eyes to the ex- 
ample of Nature in not only bringing forth a hundred 
or a thousand fold of the kind of seed planted, but in 
accompanying its growth with that of an endless variety 
of other plants, all coming to bear in a like profusion ? 

Observe that wise husbandwoman (this is not the con- 

323 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

tradiction in terms it seems), how when her business is 
apparently a hay harvest, she mingles myriads of daisies 
and milkweed and wild carrot and redtop with the grass, 
and lets her fancy riot all round the meadow in a 
broidery of blackberries and asters and dogroses and 
goldenrod. She never works without playing; and she 
plays even while man is working — plays so graciously 
and winningly that it takes the heart with joy. Who 
has ever looked upon an old-world wheat-field, where 
poppies and vetches are frolicking among the ears, and 
begrudged Nature her pastime ? No one, we will vent- 
ure, but the owner of the field, who is perhaps also too 
much of a philosopher to grieve over it. In the ideal 
world it is much the same. There, too, art having 
chosen a kind brings it to bear with all the other kinds 
which have been lurking in the unconscious soil of the 
mind and only waiting tilth for any purpose before 
springing up in company with the selected seed. This 
is what makes the poets and novelists and dramatists so 
much more profitable reading than the moralists. From 
whom, indeed, has the vital wisdom of the race been 
garnered? Not from those hard, ethical masters who 
have sought to narrow culture to the business of grow- 
ing precepts, but from the genial teachers who have in- 
culcated amusement and breathed into the unwary mind 
some inspiration which escaped as unconsciously from 
themselves. Which philosopher or sage of them all has 
instructed mankind a hundredth part as much as Shake- 
speare, who supposed himself to be merely providing 
diversion for the patrons of the Globe Theatre ? 

It follows, if not directly, then a long way about, 
from what we have been saying, that the real artist is 
never at a loss for a subject. His trouble is too many 
themes, not too few; and, having chosen among them, 

his error will be in an iron sequence rather than in a 

324 



THE RENEWAL OF INSPIRATION 

desultory progression. He is to arrive, if at all, laden 
with the spoil of the wayside, and bringing with him 
the odor of the wild flowers carpeting or roofing the by- 
paths : if he is a little bothered by the flowering brambles 
which have affectionately caught at him in his course, 
that does not greatly matter; or, at least, it is better 
than coming back to his starting-point in boots covered 
with the mud of the high-road or coat powdered with 
its dust. The sauntering ease, the excursive delays, 
will be natural to the poet or the novelist, who is born 
to them ; but the essayist must in a manner make them 
his own, if he would be an artist and survive among 
the masters, which there has been some doubt of his 
doing. It should be his care to shun every appearance 
of continuity; only in the practice of the fitful, the 
capricious, the desultory, can he hope to emulate the 
effects of the creative. With any other ideal he cannot 
hope to be fit company for the high minds who have 
furnished mankind with quotations. But for the preva- 
lence of the qualities which we have been urging the 
essayist to cultivate, in the essays of Bacon, it is not 
probable that any one would ever have fancied that 
Bacon wrote Shakespeare. 



VIII 

THE SUMMER SOJOURN OF FLORINDO AND L1NDORA 

At the moment of this writing, everybody is hurry- 
ing into the country, eager to escape the horrors of sum- 
mer in the city; at the moment when it becomes that 
reading we hope for, everybody will be hurrying into 
the city, eager to escape the horrors of summer in the 
country. At either moment the experiences of Florindo 
and Lindora should have a certain interest. 

Florindo and Lindora are a married pair, still com- 
paratively happy after forty years of wedded life, who 
have spent the part or the whole of each hot season out 
of town, sometimes in the hills, sometimes by the sea, 
sometimes in Europe. Their acquaintance with either 
form of sojourn, if not exhaustive, is so comprehensive 
that it might be cited as encyclopaedic. 

The first season or so they did not think of shutting 
up their house in the city, or doing more than taking, 
the latter part of August, a trip to Niagara or Saratoga 
or Cape May or Lake George, or some of those simple, 
old-fashioned resorts whose mere mention brings a sense 
of pre-existence, with a thrill of fond regret, to the age 
which can no longer be described as middle and is per- 
haps flattered by the epithet of three-quartering. No 
doubt people go to those places yet, but Florindo and 
Lindora have not been to any of them for so many 

summers that they can hardly realize them as still open : 

32G 



THE SUMMER SOJOURN 

for them they were closed in the earliest of the eighteen- 
seventies. 

After that, say the third summer of their marriage, it 
appeared to Lindora essential to take board somewhere 
for the whole summer, at such an easy distance that 
Florindo could run up or down or out every Satur- 
day afternoon and stay Sunday with her and the chil- 
dren ; for there had now begun to be children, who 
could not teethe in town, and for whom the abun- 
dance of pure milk, small fruits, and fresh vegetables 
promised with the shade and safety of the farm was 
really requisite. She kept the house in town still open, 
as before, or rather half-open, for she left only the 
cook in it to care for her husband, and do the family 
wash, sent to and fro by express, while she took the 
second girl with her as maid. In the first days of Sep- 
tember, when the most enterprising of the fresh vege- 
tables were beginning to appear on the table, and the 
mosquitoes were going, and the smell of old potatoes 
in the cellar and rats in the walls was airing out, and 
she was getting used to the peculiar undulations of her 
bed, she took the little teethers back to town with her; 
and when she found her husband in the comfortable 
dimensions of their own house, with melons and berries 
and tender steak, and rich cream (such as never comes 
on " pure milk "), and hot and cold baths, and no flies, 
she could not help feeling that he had been very selfish. 
~Row she understood, at least, why he never failed on 
Monday morning to wake in time for the stage to carry 
him to the station, and she said, ~Ro more farm-board 
for her if she knew it. 

In those idyllic days, while they were making their 
way, and counting the cost of every step as if it were 
the proverbial first step, the next step for Lindora was 
a large boarding-house for the summer. She tried it 

327 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

first in the country, and she tried it next at the seaside, 
with the same number of feet of piazza in both cases, 
and with no distinct difference except in the price. It 
was always dearer at the seaside, but if it had been 
better she should not have thought it so dear. Yet, as 
it was, dearer, she could not help thinking it was better ; 
and there was the beach for the teethers to dig in, and 
there was an effect of superior fashion in the gossipers 
on the piazza, one to every three of the three hundred 
feet of the piazza, rocking and talking, and guessing 
at the yachts in the offing, and then bathing and com- 
ing out to lie on the sand and dry their hair. 

At the farm she had paid seven dollars a week for 
herself, and half-price for the children ; at the country 
boarding-house she had paid ten for herself, and again 
half-price for the children ; at the seaside boarding- 
house the rate for her was fourteen dollars, and nine 
for the children and the maid. Everybody on the 
piazza said it was very cheap, but to Lindora it was 
so dear that she decided for Florindo that they could 
not go on keeping the house open and the cook in it 
just for him, as the expressage on the wash took away 
all the saving in that. If she allowed him to sleep in 
the house, he could pick up his meals for much less 
than they now cost. They must not burn their candle at 
both ends ; he must put out his end. There was reason 
in this, because now Elorindo was sometimes kept so 
late at business that he could not get the last train 
Saturday night for the beach, and he missed the Sun- 
day with his family on which she counted so much. 
Thinking these things over during the ensuing winter, 
she began to divine, toward spring, that the only thing 
for the teethers, and the true way for Florindo, was for 
her to get away from the city to a good distance, where 
there would be a real change of air, and that a moderate 

328 



THE SUIMEE SOJOUEN 

hotel in the White Mountains or the Adirondacks was 
the only hopeful guess at their problem. If Florindo 
could not come for Sunday when they were off only an 
hour or two, it would be no worse for them to be seven 
or eight hours off. Florindo agreed the more easily 
because he had now joined a club, where he got his 
meals as comfortably as at home and quite as economi- 
cally, counting in the cook. He could get a room also 
at the club, and if they shut the house altogether, and 
had it wired by the burglar-insurance company, they 
would be cutting off a frightful drain. 

It was, therefore, in the interest of clearly ascertained 
economy that Lindora took her brood with her to a 
White Mountain hotel, where she made a merit of get- 
ting board for seventeen dollars and a half a week, 
when so many were paying twenty and twenty-five. 
Florindo came up twice during the summer, and stayed 
a fortnight each time, and fished, and said that it had 
been a complete rest. On the way back to town Lindora 
stopped for October in one of those nice spring-and- 
fall places where you put in the half-season which is 
so unwholesome in the city after a long summer in the 
country, and afterward she always did this. Fort- 
unately, Florindo was prospering, and he could afford 
the increased cost of this method of saving. The sys- 
tem was practised with great success for four or Hve 
years, and then, suddenly, it failed. 

Lindora was tired of always going to the same place, 
sick and tired; and, as far as she could see, all those 
mountain-places were the same places. She could get 
no good of the air if she bored herself ; the nice people 
did not go to hotels so much now, anyway, and the 
children were dreadful, no fit associates for the teethers, 
who had long ceased to teethe but needed a summer 
outing as much as ever. A series of seasons followed 

22 329 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

when the married pair did not know where to go, in 
the person of the partner who represented them, and 
they had each spring a controversy vividly resembling 
a quarrel, but which was really not a quarrel, because 
the Dear knew that if it were not for the children 
Lindora would only be too glad never to leave their 
own house winter or summer, but just to stick there, 
year out and year in. Then, at least, she could look 
a little after Florindo, who had lived so much at the 
club that he had fairly forgotten he had a wife and 
children. The trouble was all with Florindo, anyway ; 
he cared more for his business than his family, much; 
if he did not, he could have managed somehow to spend 
the summers with them. Other men did it, and ran 
down once a month, or once a fortnight, to put things 
in shape, and then came back. 

Sleeping on a midnight view of her hard case, Lin- 
dora woke one morning with an inspiration; it might 
not be too much to call it a revelation. She wondered 
at herself, she was ashamed of herself, for not having 
thought of it before. Europe, of course, was the only 
solution. Once in Europe, you need not worry about 
where to go, for you could go anywhere. Europe was 
everywhere, and you had your choice of the Swiss 
mountains, where every breath made another person of 
you, or the Italian lakes with their glorious scenery, or 
the English lakes with their literary associations, or 
Scheveningen and all Holland, or Etretat, or Ostend, 
or any of those thousands of German baths where you 
could get over whatever you had, and the children could 
pick up languages with tutors, and the life was so amus- 
ing. Going to Europe was excuse enough in itself for 
Elorindo to leave his business, and, if he could not be 
gone more than one summer, he could place her and the 

children out there till their health and education were 

330 



THE SUMMER SOJOURN 

completed, and they could all return home when it was 
time for the girls to think of coming out and the boys 
of going to college. 

Morindo, as she expected, had not a reasonable word 
to say against a scheme that must commend itself to 
any reasonable man. In fact, he scarcely opposed it. 
He said he had begun to feel a little run down, and he 
had just been going to propose Europe himself as the 
true solution. She gladly gave him credit for the idea, 
and said he had the most inventive mind she ever heard 
of. She agreed without a murmur to the particular 
German baths which the doctor said would be best for 
him, because she just knew that the waters would be 
good for all of them; and when he had taken his cure 
the family made his after-cure with him, and they had 
the greatest fun, after the after-cure, in travelling about 
Germany. They got as far down as the Italian lakes 
in the early autumn, and by the time Elorindo had to 
go back the rest were comfortably settled in Paris for 
the winter. 

As a solution Europe was perfect, but it was not per- 
petual. After three years the bottom seemed to fall 
out, as Florindo phrased it, and the family came home 
to face the old fearful problem of where to spend the 
summer. Lindora knew where not to spend it, but her 
wisdom ended there, and when a friend who was going 
to Europe offered them her furnished cottage at a mere- 
ly nominal rent, Lindora took it because she could not 
think of anything else. They all found it so charming 
that after that summer she never would think again 
of hotels or any manner of boarding. They hired cot- 
tages, at rents not so nominal as at first, but not so 
very extravagant if you had not to keep the city rent 
going, too ; and it finally seemed best to buy a cottage, 

and stop the leak of the rent, however small it was. 

331 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

Lindora did not count the interest on the purchase- 
money, or the taxes, or the repairs, or the winter care- 
taking. 

She was now living, and is still living, as most of her 
contemporaries and social equals are living, not quite 
free of care, but free of tiresome associations, cramped 
rooms, bad beds, and bad food, with an environment 
Avhich you can perfectly control if you are willing to 
pay the price. The situation is ideal to those without, 
and, if not ideal to those within, it is nevertheless the 
best way of spending the hot season known to com- 
petitive civilization. What is most interesting to the 
student of that civilization is the surprisingly short 
time in which it has been evolved. Half a century ago 
it was known only to some of the richest people. A few 
very old and opulent families in New York had coun- 
try - places on the Hudson ; in Boston the same class 
had summer houses at Nahant or in Pepperell. The 
wealthy planters of the South came North to the hotels 
of Saratoga, Lake George, and Niagara, whither the 
vast majority of the fashionable Northern people also 
resorted. In the West it was the custom to leave home 
for a summer trip up the lakes or down the St. Law- 
rence. But this was the custom only for the very 
sophisticated, and even now in the West people do not 
summer outside of their winter homes to at all the same 
extent as in the East. 

The experience of Florindo and Lindora is easily 
parallelable in that of innumerable other married pairs 
cf American race, who were the primitive joke of the 
paragrapher and the caricaturist when the day of farm- 
boarding began. Though the sun of that day has long 
set for Florindo and Lindora, it seems to be still at the 
zenith for most young couples beginning life on their 

forgotten terms, and the joke holds in its pristine fresh- 

' 332 



THE SUMMEK SOJOUKN 

ness with the lowlier satirists, who hunt the city boarder 
in the country and the seaside boarding-houses. The 
Florindos and the Lindoras of a little greater age and 
better fortune abound in the summer hotels at the 
beaches and in the mountains, though at the more 
worldly watering-places the cottagers have killed off the 
hotels, as the graphic parlance has it. The hotels no- 
where, perhaps, flourish in their old vigor ; except for a 
brief six weeks, when they are fairly full, they languish 
along the rivers, among the hills, and even by the shores 
of the mournful and misty Atlantic. 

The summer cottage, in fine, is what Florindo and 
Lindora have typically come to in so many cases that 
it may be regarded as the typical experience of the 
easily circumstanced American of the East, if not of the 
West. The slightest relaxation of the pressure of nar- 
row domestic things seems to indicate it, and the reader 
would probably be astonished to find what great num- 
bers of people, who are comparatively poor, have sum- 
mer cottages, though the cottage in most cases is per- 
haps as much below the dignity of a real cottage as the 
sumptuous villas of Newport are above it. Summer 
cottages with the great average of those who have them 
began in the slightest and simplest of shanties, pro- 
gressing toward those simulacra of houses aptly called 
shells, and gradually arriving at picturesque structures, 
prettily decorated, with all the modern conveniences, in 
which one may spend two-thirds of the year and more 
of one's income than one has a quiet conscience in. 

It would not be so bad, if one could live in them 
simply, as Lindora proposed doing when she made 
Florindo buy hers for her, but the graces of life 
cannot be had for nothing, or anything like noth- 
ing, and when you have a charming cottage, and 
are living on city terms in it, you have the wish to 

333 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

have people see you doing it. This ambition leads to 
endless and rather aimless hospitality, so that some 
Lindoras have been known, after keeping a private hotel 
in their cottages for a series of summers, to shut them 
or let them, and go abroad for a much-needed rest, 
leaving their Florindos to their clubs as in the days 
of their youth, or even allowing them to live in their 
own houses with their cooks. 

Nothing in this world, it seems, is quite what we 
want it to be ; we ourselves are not all that we could 
wish; and, whatever shape our summering takes, the 
crumpled rose-leaf is there to disturb our repose. The 
only people who have no crumpled rose-leaves under 
them are those who have no repose, but stay striving 
on amid the heat of the city while the prey of the 
crumpled rose-leaf is suffering among the hills or by 
the sea. Those home - keeping Sybarites, composing 
seven-eighths of our urban populations, immune from 
the anguish of the rose-leaf, form themselves the pang 
of its victims in certain extreme cases; the thought of 
them poisons the pure air, and hums about the sleep- 
less rest-seeker in the resorts where there are no mos- 
quitoes. There are Florindos, there are Lindoras, so 
sensitively conscienced that, in the most picturesque, the 
most prettily appointed and thoroughly convenienced 
cottages, they cannot forget their fellow-mortals in the 
summer hotels, in the boarding-houses by sea or shore, 
in the farms where they have small fruits, fresh vege- 
tables, and abundance of milk and eggs ; yes, they even 
remember those distant relations who toil and swelter 
in the offices, the shops, the streets, the sewers ; and they 
are not without an unavailing shame for their own 
good-fortune. 

But is it really their good-fortune? They would 
not exchange it for the better fortune of the home- 

334 



THE SUMMEK SOJOURN 

keepers, and yet it seems worse than that of people less 
voluntarily circumstanced. There is nothing left for 
Florindo and Lindora to try, except spending the sum- 
mer on a yacht, which they see many other Elorindos 
and Lindoras doing. Even these gay voyagers, or gay 
anchorers (for they seem most of the time to he moored 
in safe harbors), do not appear altogether to like their 
lot, or to be so constantly contented with it but that they 
are always coming off in boats to dine at the neighbor- 
ing hotels. Doubtless a yacht has a crumpled rose-leaf 
under it, and possibly the keelless hull of the house- 
boat feels the irk of a folded petal somewhere. 

Elorindo and Lindora are not spoiled, she is sure of 
that in her own case, for she has never been unrea- 
sonably exacting of circumstance. She has always tried 
to be more comfortable than she found herself, but that 
is the condition of progress, and it is from the perpetual 
endeavor for the amelioration of circumstance that 
civilization springs. The fault may be with Elorindo, 
in some way that she cannot see, but it is certainly not 
with her, and, if it is not with him, then it is with the 
summer, which is a season so unreasonable that it will 
not allow itself to be satisfactorily disposed of. In 
town it is intolerable; in the mountains it is sultry by 
day and all but freezing by night; at the seaside it is 
cold and wet or dry and cold; there are flies and mos- 
quitoes everywhere but in Europe, and, with the bottom 
once out of Europe, you cannot go there without drop- 
ping through. In Lindora's experience the summer has 
had the deceitful effect of owning its riddle read at 
each new conjecture, but, having exhausted all her prac- 
tical guesses, she finds the summer still the mute, inex- 
orable sphinx for which neither farm-board, boarding- 
houses, hotels, European sojourn, nor cottaging is the 
true answer. 

335 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

Sometimes Florindo or Lindora is out of all patience 
with the summer, and in a despair which she is careful 
to share with Florindo, as far as she can make him a 
partner of it. But as it is his business to provide the 
means of each new condition, and hers to prove it im- 
possible, he is not apt to give way so fully as she. He 
tells her that their trouble is that they have always 
endeavored to escape an ordeal which if frankly borne 
might not have been so bad, and he has tried to make 
her believe that some of the best times he has had in 
summer have been when he was too busy to think about 
it. She retorts that she is busy, too, from morning till 
night, without finding the least relief from the sum- 
mer ordeal or forgetting it a single moment. 

The other day he came home from the club with a 
beaming face, and told her that he had just heard of 
a place where the summer was properly disposed of, 
and she said that they would go there at once, she did 
not care where it was. 

" Well, I don't know," he answered. " There would 
have to be two opinions, I believe." 

" Why ?" she demanded, sharply. " Where is it ?" 

" In the other world. Fanshawe, the Swedenborgian, 
was telling me about it. In one of the celestial heavens 
— there seem to be seven of them — it appears that all 
the four seasons are absorbed into one, as all the dif- 
ferent ages are absorbed into a sort of second youth. 
This sole season is neither hot nor cold, but has the 
quality of a perpetual springtime. How would you like 
that?" 

Lindora was too vexed with him to make any answer, 
and he was sorry. He, too, felt the trouble of the sum- 
mer more than he would allow, and he would willingly 
have got away from it if he could. Lindora's im- 
patience with it amused him, but it is doubtful if in 

336 



THE SUMMER SOJOURN 

the moment of his greatest amusement with her im- 
patience he had any glimpse of that law of the uni- 
versal life by which no human creature is permitted 
to escape a due share of the responsibilities and burdens 
of the common lot, or realized that to seek escape from 
them is a species of immorality which is unfailingly 
punished like any other sin, in and from itself. 



IX 

TO HAVE THE HONOR OF MEETING 

As the winter deepens and darkens, the people who 
have time and money to waste, and who are always 
seeking opportunities for squandering both, find none 
so gracious and graceful as giving dinners to other peo- 
ple who have time and money to waste. The prime 
condition of such dinners is that neither host nor guest 
shall need them. The presence of a person who actually 
wanted meat and drink would imply certain insuper- 
able disqualifications. The guest must have the habit 
of dining, with the accumulated indifference to dinners 
and the inveterate inability to deal peptically with them 
which result from the habit of them. Your true diner 
must be well on in middle life, for though the young 
may eat and drink together and apparently dine, it is 
of the gray head difficultly bowed over the successive 
courses, and the full form of third youth straining its 
silken calyx and bursting all too richly out above it, 
that the vision presents itself when one thinks of din- 
ners and diners. 

After all the exclusions are made, dinner is still a 

theme so large that one poor Easy Chair paper could 

not compass it, or do more than attach itself here and 

there to its expanse. In fact, it was only one kind of 

dinner we had in mind at the beginning, and that was 

the larger or smaller public dinner. There the process 

338 



THE HONOE OF MEETING 

of exclusion is carried yet a step further, and the guests 
are all men, and for the most part elderly men. The 
exceptional public dinners where women are asked need 
not he counted ; and at other public dinners they do not 
seem eager to throng the galleries, where they are 
handsomely privileged to sit, looking down, among the 
sculptured and frescoed arabesques, on the sea of bald 
heads and shirt-fronts that surge about the tables be- 
low, and showing like dim, decollete angels to the 
bleared vision raised to them from the floor. As they 
are not expected to appear till the smoking and speak- 
ing have begun, they grow fainter and fainter through 
the clouds of tobacco and oratory, and it is never known 
to the diners whether they abuse the chary hospitality 
of coffee and ices offered them in their skyey height, 
where from time to time the sympathetic ear may hear 
them softly gasping, gently coughing. 

It is a pity that none of these witnesses of a large 
public dinner has recorded her bird's-eye impression of 
it at the interesting moment when their presence is 
suffered or desired. All those gray or bald heads, and 
all those bulging shirt-fronts, must look alike at the 
first glance, and it can be only to carefuler scrutiny 
that certain distinctions of projecting whiskers and 
mustaches pronounce themselves. The various figures, 
lax or stiff in their repletion, must more or less re- 
peat one another, and the pudgy hands, resting heavily 
on the tables' edges or planted on their owners' thighs, 
must seem of a very characterless monotony. The poor 
old fellows ranked in serried sameness at the tables 
slanted or curved from the dais where the chairman 
and the speakers sit must have one effect of wishing 
themselves at home in bed. 

What do they really think of it, those angels, leaning 
over and looking down on it ? Does it strike them with 

330 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

envy, with admiration? Does it seem one of the last 
effects of a high and noble civilization ? To their 
" finer female sense/' what is the appeal of that evanes- 
cing spectacle, as the noise of the cheering and the 
laughing and the clapping of hands rises to them at 
some more rocket-like explosion of oratory? Is the 
oratory mainly of the same quality to those supernal 
intelligences as the fading spectacle? None of them 
has said, and we may have still the hope that the whole 
affair may have seemed to them the splendid and grace- 
ful ceremonial which it appears in the illustrations of 
the next day's papers. 

The speaking is perhaps not always so good as it 
seems to the mellowed tolerance of the listener, when it 
begins after all those courses of meat and drink, but 
not perhaps always so bad as he thinks it when, the 
morning following, he wakes " high sorrowful and 
cloyed," and has not yet read the reports of it. In 
confidence, however, it may be owned that it is apt 
rather to be bad than good. If what has led up to it 
has softened the critical edge of the listener, it has not 
sharpened the critical edge of the speaker, and they 
meet on the common ground where any platitude passes, 
where a farrago of funny stories serves the purpose of 
coherent humor, where any feeble flash of wit lights up 
the obscurity as with an electric radiance, where any 
slightest trickle or rinsing of sentiment refreshes " the 
burning forehead and the parching tongue " like a gush 
of genuine poetry. The mere reputation of the speaker 
goes a great way, almost the whole way ; and, especially 
if he is a comic speaker, he might rise up and sit down 
without a word and yet leave his hearers the sense of 
having been richly amused. If he does more, if he 
really says something droll, no matter how much below 
the average of the give and take of common talk, the 

340 



THE HONOR OF MEETING 

listener's gratitude is frantic. It is so eager, it so out- 
runs utterance, that it is not strange the after-dinner 
speech should be the favorite field of the fake-humorist, 
who reaps a full and ever-ripened harvest in it, and 
prospers on to a celebrity for brilliancy which there is 
little danger of his ever forfeiting so long as he keeps 
there. 

The fake-humorous speaker has an easier career than 
even the fake-eloquent speaker. Yet at any given din- 
ner the orator who passes out mere elocution to his 
hearers has a success almost as instant and splendid 
as his clowning brother. It is amazing what things 
people will applaud when they have the courage of 
one another's ineptitude. They will listen, after din- 
ner, to anything but reason. They prefer also the old 
speakers to new ones; they like the familiar taps of 
humor, of eloquence; if they have tasted the brew be- 
fore, they know what they are going to get. The note 
of their mood is tolerance, but tolerance of the accus- 
tomed, the expected ; not tolerance of the novel, the sur- 
prising. They wish to be at rest, and what taxes their 
minds molests their intellectual repose. They do not 
wish to climb any great heights to reach the level of 
the orator. Perhaps, after all, they are difficult in their 
torpidity. 

The oratory seems to vary less throughout any given 
dinner than from dinner to dinner, and it seems better 
or worse according as the dinner is occasional or per- 
sonal. The occasional dinner is in observance of some 
notable event, as the Landing of the Pilgrims, or the 
Surrender of Cornwallis, or the Invention of Gun- 
powder, or the Discovery of America. Its nature in- 
vites the orator to a great range of talk ; he may browse 
at large in all the fields of verbiage without seeming to 
break bounds. It rests with him, of course, to decide 

341 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

whether he will talk too long, for the danger that he 
may do so cannot be guarded from the outside. The 
only good after-dinner speaker is the man who likes to 
speak, and the man who likes to speak is always apt to 
speak too much. The hapless wretch whom the chair- 
man drags to his feet in a cold perspiration of despair, 
and who blunders through half a dozen mismated sen- 
tences, leaving out whatever he meant to say, is not to 
be feared; he is to be pitied from the bottom of one's 
soul. But the man whose words come actively to the 
support of his thoughts, and whose last word suggests 
to him another thought, he is the speaker to be feared, 
and yet not feared the worst of all. There is another 
speaker more dreadful still, who thinks as little stand- 
ing as sitting, and whose words come reluctantly, but 
who keeps on and on in the vain hope of being able to 
say something before he stops, and so cannot stop. 

The speaking at the occasional dinner, however, is 
much more in the control of the chairman than the 
speaking at the personal dinner. The old fashion of 
toasts is pretty well past, but the chairman still ap- 
points, more or less, the subject of the speaker he calls 
up. He may say, if the dinner is in honor of the In- 
vention of Gunpowder, " We have with us to-night a 
distinguished soldier who has burned a good deal of 
gunpowder in his time; and I am sure we should all 
like to hear from General Jones something of his ex- 
perience with the new smokeless explosives." Or if it 
is the Discovery of America they are commemorating, 
he may call to his feet some representatively venerable 
citizen, with a well-earned compliment to his antiquity, 
and the humorous suggestion that he was personally 
knowing to the landing of Columbus. Then General 
Jones, or the venerable citizen, will treat at his pleas- 
ure of any subject under heaven, after having made his 

342 



THE HONOR OF MEETING 

manners to that given him by the chairman and pro- 
fessed his unfitness to handle it. 

At the personal dinner, the speaker must in decency 
stick for a while at least to his text, which is always 
the high achievement of the honored guest, in law, 
letters, medicine, arms, drainage, dry-goods, poultry- 
farming, or whatever. He must not, at once, turn his 
back on the honored guest and talk of other things; 
and when sometimes he does so it seems rude. 

The menu laid before the diner at this sort of dinner 
may report a variety of food for the others, but for the 
honored guest the sole course is taffy, with plenty of 
drawn butter in a lordly dish. The honored guest is 
put up beside the chairman, with his mouth propped 
open for the taffy, and before the end he is streaming 
drawn butter from every limb. The chairman has 
poured it over him with a generous ladle in his opening 
speech, and each speaker bathes him with it anew from 
the lordly dish. The several speakers try to surpass 
one another in the application, searching out some cor- 
ner or crevice of his personality which has escaped 
the previous orators, and filling it up to overflowing. 
The listeners exult with them in their discoveries, and 
roar at each triumph of the sort: it is apparently a 
proof of brilliant intuition when a speaker seizes upon 
some forgotten point in the honored guest's character 
or career and drenches it with drawn butter. 

To what good end do men so flatter and befool one 
of their harmless fellows ? What is there in the nature 
of literary or agricultural achievement which justifies 
the outrage of his modest sense of inadequacy ? It is a 
preposterous performance, but it does not reach the 
climax of its absurdity till the honored guest rises, 
with his mouth filled with taffy, and, dripping drawn 
butter all over the place, proceeds to ladle out from the 

343 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

Lordly dish, restored to its place before the chairman, a 
portion for each of the preceding speakers. He may 
not feel quite like doing it. In their fierce rivalry of 
adulation, some of them, in order to give fresh flavor 
to the tafTy, may have mingled a little vinegar with it. 
One may have said that the bantams of the honored 
guest were not perhaps as small as some other bantams, 
but that the colossal size of his shanghais was beyond 
parallel. Another may have hinted, for the purpose 
of superiorly praising his masterly treatment of the 
pip, that the diet of his hens was not such as to impart 
to their eggs the last exquisite flavor demanded by the 
pampered palate of the epicure. Another yet may have 
admitted that the honored guest had not successfully 
grappled with the great question of how to make hens 
lay every working-day of the year, and he may have 
done this in order to heighten his grand climax that 
the man who teaches a hen to lay an egg with two yolks 
where she laid eggs of but one yolk before is a greater 
benefactor to the human race than all the inventors of 
all the missiles of modern warfare. Such a poultry- 
farmer, he may have declared, preparatory to taking 
his seat amid thunders of applause, is to other poultry- 
farmers what the poet who makes the songs of a people 
is to the boss who makes their laws. This sentiment 
may have been met with a furore of acceptance, all the 
other guests leaning forward to look at the honored 
guest and concentrate their applause upon him, as they 
clapped and cheered, and one fine fellow springing to 
his feet and shouting, "Here's to the man who made 
two-yolk eggs grow where one-yolk eggs grew before." 
Yet these artfully studied qualifications of the cloy- 
ing sweet may have been all of the taste of wormwood 
to the honored guest, who cared nothing for his easy 
triumph with shanghais and the pip and these two-yolk 

344 



THE HONOR OF MEETING 

eggs, but prided himself on his bantams and his hen- 
food, and was clinging to the hope that his discoveries 
in the higher education would teach hens to observe the 
legal holidays if they could not be taught to lay on 
every working-day, and was trusting to keep his meas- 
ure of failure a secret from the world. It would not 
do, however, to betray anything of his vexation. That 
would be ungracious and ungrateful, and so he must 
render back taffy for taffy, drawn butter for drawn 
butter, till the whole place sticks and reeks with it. 

Of course, the reader — especially if he has never been 
asked to a personal dinner of this sort — will be saying 
that the fault is not with the solemnity or its nature, 
but with the taste of those who conduct the ceremony. 
He will no doubt be thinking that if he were ever made 
the object of such a solemnity, or the chairman, or the 
least of the speakers, he would manage differently. 
Very likely he will allege the example of the Greeks, 
as we have it recorded in the accounts of the banquet 
offered to Themistocles after the battle of Salamis, and 
the supper given to iEschylus on the hundredth per- 
formance of the (Edipus of Sophocles. 

The supper has always been considered rather a re- 
finement upon the banquet, in taste, as it was offered 
to the venerable poet not upon the occasion of any 
achievement of his own, but in recognition of the pro- 
longed triumph of his brother dramatist, in which it 
was assumed that he would feel a generous interest. 
The banquet to Themistocles was more in the nature 
of a public rejoicing, for it celebrated a victory due 
as much to the valor of all the Greeks as to the genius 
of the admiral; and it could, therefore, be made more 
directly a compliment to him. Even under these cir- 
cumstances, however, the guest of the evening occupied 
an inconspicuous place at the reporters' table, while he 

23 345 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

was represented on the chairman's right by the bust of 
Poseidon, hastily modelled for the occasion by Prax- 
iteles, and dedicated to Themistocles, who was a plain 
man, but whose portrait, even if he had been handsome, 
it was thought would not have looked well in such a 
position at a time when portrait-statuary was unknown. 
The only direct allusion to him was in the opening toast, 
" The Dewey of Our Day," which was drunk sitting, 
the guests rising from their recumbent postures in honor 
of it. The chairman's opening address was almost 
wholly a plea for the enlargement of the Athenian 
navy : the implication that the republic had been saved, 
in spite of its inefficient armament, was accepted as the 
finest possible compliment to the guest of the evening. 
The note of all the other speeches was their exquisite 
impersonality. They got further and further from the 
occasion of the evening, until the effort of Demosthenes 
closed the speaking with a scathing denunciation of the 
machine politicians who had involved the Athenians in 
a war with Persia to further the interests of Sparta. 
It was held that this was the noblest tribute which 
could be paid to the genius of the man who had brought 
them safely out of it. As the company broke up, Di- 
ogenes with his lantern approached Themistocles, who 
was giving the reporters copies of the speech he had 
not been asked to deliver, and, after examining his 
countenance with a sigh of disappointment, accom- 
panied him home as far as his own tub; Athens at 
that time being imperfectly lighted, and the reform 
government having not yet replaced the street names 
wantonly obliterated under the regime of the Thirty 
Tyrants. 

At the supper to ^Eschylus the tablets of the menu 
were inscribed with verses from the elder poet ingen- 
iously chosen for their imaginable reference to the mas- 

346 



THE HONOK OF MEETING 

terpiece of the younger, whose modesty was delicately 
spared at every point. It was a question whether the 
committee managing the affair had not perhaps gone 
too far in giving the supper while Sophocles was away 
from Athens staging the piece at Corinth; but there 
was no division of opinion as to the taste with which 
some of the details had been studied. It was consid- 
ered a stroke of inspiration to have on the speaker's 
left, where Sophocles would have sat if he had been 
present at a supper given to iEschylus, the sitting fig- 
ure of Melpomene, crowned with rosemary for remem- 
brance. ~No allusion was made to iEschylus during the 
evening, after his health had been proposed by the 
chairman and drunk in silence, but a great and ex- 
quisite surprise was reserved for him in the matter of 
the speeches that followed. By prior agreement among 
the speakers they were all ostensibly devoted to the ex- 
amination of the (Edipus and the other dramas of 
Sophocles, which in his absence were very frankly dealt 
with. But the unsparing criticism of their defects was 
made implicitly to take the character of appreciation of 
the iEschylus tragedies, whose good points were all 
turned to the light without open mention of them. This 
afforded the aged poet an opportunity of magnanimous- 
ly defending his younger confrere,, and he rose to the 
occasion, beaming, as some one said, from head to foot 
and oozing self-satisfaction at every pore. He could 
not put from him the compliments not ostensibly di- 
rected at him, but he could and did take up the criti- 
cisms of the Sophoclean drama, point by point, and 
refute them in the interest of literature, with a masterly 
elimination of himself and his own part in it. A Ro- 
man gentleman present remarked that he had seen noth- 
ing like it, for sincere deprecation, since Cassar had 
refused the thrice-offered crown on the Lupercal; and 

347 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

the effect was that intended throughout — the supreme 
honor of ^Eschylus in the guise of a tribute to Soph- 
ocles. The note of the whole affair was struck by the 
comic poet Aristophanes, whom the chairman called 
upon to make the closing speech of the evening, and 
who merely sat up long enough to quote the old Attic 
proverb, " Gentlemen, there are many ways to kill a 
dog besides choking him to death with butter," and then 
lay down again amid shrieks of merriment from the 
whole company. 

There is, perhaps, a middle course between the Amer- 
ican and Athenian ways of recognizing achievement in 
the arts or interests, or of commemorating great pub- 
lic events. This would probably derive from each cer- 
tain advantages, or at least the ancient might temper 
the modern world to a little more restraint than it now 
practises in the celebration of private worth, especially. 
The public events may be more safely allowed to take 
care of themselves, though it is to be questioned whether 
it is well for any people to make overmuch of them- 
selves. They cannot do it without making themselves 
ridiculous, and perhaps making themselves sick of what 
little real glory there is in any given affair; they will 
have got that so inextricably mixed up with the vain- 
glory that they will have to reject the one to free them- 
selves from the humiliating memory of the other. 

There is nothing that so certainly turns to shame in 
the retrospect as vainglory, and this is what the per- 
sonal dinner is chiefly supposed to inspire in the victim 
of it. If he is at all honest with himself, and he prob- 
ably is before he can have done anything worthy of 
notice, he knows perfectly well that he has not merited 
all if any of the fond flatteries with which he is heaped, 
as he sits helpless with meat and drink, and suffers 
tinder them with the fatuous smile which we all have 

348 



THE HONOR OF MEETING 

seen and which some of us have worn. But as the flat- 
terers keep coming on and on, each with his garland of 
tuberoses or sunflowers, he begins to think that there 
must be some fire where there is so much smoke, and to 
feel the glow of the flame which he is not able exactly 
to locate. He burns in sympathy with his ardent 
votaries, he becomes inevitably a partner in his own 
apotheosis. It is the office of the sad, cold morrow, and 
the sadder and colder after-morrows, to undo this il- 
lusion, to compress his head to the measure of his hat, 
to remove the drawn butter from his soul. 

They may never wholly succeed, but this is not prob- 
able, and it is not against a permanent folie des gran- 
deurs that we need seek to guard the victim of a per- 
sonal dinner. We have, indeed, so much faith in the 
ultimate discretion of the race that we should be quite 
willing to intrust the remarkable man himself with the 
office of giving himself a public dinner when he felt 
that his work merited signal recognition. In this way 
the whole affair could be kept within bounds. He 
could strike the rote, he could set the pace, in his 
opening address; and, having appointed the speakers, 
with a full knowledge of their honesty and subordina- 
tion, he could trust the speeches to be sane and tem- 
perate. In calling the speakers successively up, he 
could protest against anything that seemed excessive 
eulogy in the words already spoken, and could invite 
a more mode? J : estimate of his qualities and achieve- 
ments in the speeches to follow. 



A DAY AT BRONX PARK 

In - the beginning of the season which is called Silly 
in the world of journalism, because the outer vacuity 
then responds to the inner, and the empty brain vainly 
interrogates the empty environment for something to 
write of, two friends of the Easy Chair offered to spend 
a holiday in search of material for a paper. The only 
conditions they made were that the Easy Chair should 
not exact material of weight or importance, but should 
gratefully accept whatever they brought back to it, and 
make the most of it. On these terms they set out on 
their labor of love. 

By the time the sun had quitted the face of the vast 
apartment-house on which the day habitually broke, and 
had gone about its business of lighting and heating the 
city roofs and streets, the holiday companions were well 
on their way up the Third Avenue Elevated toward 
that region of the Bronx which, in all their New York 
years, they had never yet visited. They exulted at 
each stop and start of the train in the long succession 
of streets which followed so fast upon one another that 
the guards gave up trying to call them out as a hundred- 
and-so-many, and simply said Fifty-fifth, and Sixty- 
sixth, and Seventy-seventh Street. This slight of their 
duty to the public comported agreeably with the slip- 

350 



A DAY AT BRONX PARK 

shod effectiveness of the whole apparatus of the New 
York life: the rows and rows of shops, the rows and 
rows of flats, the rows and rows of back yards with 
miles of wash flying in the soft May wind, which, prob- 
ably, the people in the open car ahead felt almost a 
gale. 

When the train got as far as the composite ugliness 
of the ships and tugs and drawbridges of Harlem River, 
the companions accepted the ensemble as picturesque- 
ness, and did not require beauty of it. Once they did 
get beauty in a certain civic building which fronted the 
track and let fall a double stairway from its level in 
a way to recall the Spanish Steps and to get itself 
likened to the Trinita, de' Monti at Rome. 

It was, of course, like that only in their fond re- 
membrance, but this was not the only Roman quality 
in their cup of pleasure that day ; and they did not care 
to inquire whether it was merely the flavoring extract 
of fancy, or was a genuine infusion from the Italian 
sky overhead, the classic architectural forms, the loosely 
straggling grass, the flowering woods, the rapture of the 
birds, the stretches of the river, the tumbling rapids, 
which so delicately intoxicated them. There was a 
certain fountain gave a peculiar authenticity to their 
pleasure, as of some assurance blown in the bottle from 
which their joy-draught was poured. Nowhere else but 
in Rome could they have imagined such a group of 
bronze men and maidens and web-footed horses strug- 
gling so bravely, so aimlessly (except to show their fig- 
ures), in a shallow bowl from which the water spilled 
so unstintedly over white marble brims beginning to 
paint themselves palely green. 

At the end of their glad day this fountain came last 
of the things that made Bronx Park such a paradise 
for eight hours; though it might have been their first 

351 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

delight if they had taken one way about instead of an- 
other in their tour of the large, easy pleasance. But 
suddenly at half - past eleven they found themselves 
ravenously hungry, and demanded to be driven to the 
best restaurant by the shortest way that the mild youth 
whom they fell to at once inside the park gate could 
find. 

He had the very horse he ought to have had — old, 
weary, infirm, decently hiding its disabilities under a 
blanket, and, when this was stripped away, confessing 
them in a start so reluctant that they had to be ex- 
plained as the stiffness natural to any young, strong, 
and fresh horse from resting too long. It did, in fact, 
become more animated as time went on, and perhaps it 
began to take an interest in the landscape left so charm- 
ingly wild wherever it could be. It apparently liked 
being alive there with its fares, kindred spirits, who 
could appreciate the privacy of a bland Monday after 
the popular outing of the day before. Almost nobody 
else was in the park. For a time they noted only a 
young fellow with a shut book in his hand taking his 
way up a woody slope and fading into a green shadow; 
but presently they came to a grassy point running down 
to the road, where, under a tree, there was a young 
mother sitting with an open book in her lap, and, a 
little way from her outstretched little foot, her baby 
asleep in the smallest of go-carts — the collapsible sort 
that you can fold and carry in the cars and then unfold 
for use when you come to the right place. The baby 
had a white sunbonnet, and a thick fringe of her straw- 
colored hair came out over her forehead under it, and 
when the companions smiled together at the baby, and 
the horse intelligently faltered, the young mother flut- 
tered the idle leaves of her book with her hand and 
smiled back at them, and took the credit of the little 

352 



A DAY AT BRONX PARK 

one, not unkindly, yet proudly. They said it was all 
as nice as it could be, and they were still so content in 
her and her baby that, when they had to drive out of the 
park to cross a street to the section where the restaurant 
and the menagerie were, they waited deferentially for a 
long, long funeral to get by. They felt pity for the 
bereaved, and then admiration for people who could 
afford to have so many carriages ; and they made their 
driver ask the mounted policeman whose funeral it 
was. He addressed the policeman by name, and the 
companions felt included in the circle of an acquaint- 
ance where a good deal of domesticity seemed to pre- 
vail. The policeman would not join in the conjecture 
that it was some distinguished person ; he did not give 
his reasons; and the pair began to fret at their delay, 
and mentally to hurry that poor unknown underground 
— so short is our patience with the dead ! When at last 
their driver went up round the endless queue of hacks, 
it suddenly came to an end, and they were again in 
the park and among the cages and pens and ranges 
of the animals, in the midst of which their own res- 
taurant appeared. An Italian band of mandolins 
and guitars was already at noonday softly murmur- 
ing and whimpering in the corner of the veranda 
where the tables were set; and they got an amiable 
old waiter, whose fault it was not if spring-lamb ma- 
tures so early in the summer of its brief term as to 
seem last-fall-lnmb. There is no good reason either to 
suppose he did not really believe in the pease. But 
why will pease that know they have been the whole 
winter in the can pretend to be just out of the pod? 
Doubtless it is for every implication that all vegeta- 
tion is of one ichor with humanity; but the waiter 
was honester than the pease. He telephoned for two 
wheeled chairs, and then said he had countermanded 

353 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

them because they would be half an hour coming; but 
again he telephoned, for by this time the pair had 
learned that they might drive into the zoological 
grounds, but not drive round them; and they saw 
from the window the sun smoking hot on the asphalt 
paths their feet must press. 

While the chairs lingered on the way, they went to 
get what comfort they could from the bears, whose 
house was near at hand. They might well have learned 
patience here from a bear trying to cope with a mock- 
ing cask in a pool. He pushed it under the water with 
his paw and held it hard down; when he turned away 
as if that cask were done for, there it was bobbing 
about on the surface, and he had to down it again and 
hold it under till life seemed extinct. At last he gave 
it up and left it floating in triumph, but one could 
infer with what perseverance he would renew the strug- 
gle presently. 

There might have been too many bears ; but this was 
the fault of all their fellow-captives except perhaps 
the elephants. One cannot really have enough of ele- 
phants; and one would have liked a whole herd of 
giraffes, and a whole troop of gnus would not have 
glutted one's pleasure in their goat-faces, cow-heads, 
horse-tails, and pig-feet. But why so many snakes of 
a kind ? Why such a multiplicity of crocodiles ? Why 
even more than one of that special pattern of Mexican 
iguana which looked as if cut out of zinc and painted 
a dull Paris green? Why, above all, so many small 
mammals ? 

Small mammals was the favorite phrase of the friend- 
ly colored chair-man, who by this time had appeared 
with an old-soldier comrade and was pushing the com- 
panions about from house to house and cage to cage. 
Small mammals, he warned them, were of an offensive 

354 



A DAY AT BKONX PARK 

odor, and he was right; but he was proud of them and 
of sach scientific knowledge of them as he had. The 
old soldier did not pretend to have any such knowledge. 
He fell into a natural subordination, and let his col- 
ored superior lead the way mostly, though he asserted 
the principle that this is a white man's country by 
pushing first to the lions' house instead of going to 
the flying-cage, as his dark comrade instructed him. 

It was his sole revolt. " But what," we hear the 
reader asking, " is the flying-cage ?" We have not come 
to that yet; we are lingering still at the lions' house, 
where two of the most amiable lions in the world smil- 
ingly illustrate the effect of civilization in such of their 
savage species as are born in the genial captivity of 
Bronx Park. We are staying a moment in the cool 
stone stable of the elephants and the rhinoceroses and 
the hippopotamuses ; we are fondly clinging to the wires 
of the cages where the hermit-thrushes, snatched from 
their loved solitude and mixed with an indiscriminate 
company of bolder birds, tune their angelic notes only 
in a tentative staccato ; we are standing rapt before the 
awful bell-bird ringing his sharp, unchanging, unceas- 
ing peal, as unconscious of us as if he had us in the 
heart of his tropical forest; we are waiting for the 
mighty blue Brazilian macaw to catch our names and 
syllable them to the shrieking, shrilling, snarling so- 
ciety of parrots trapezing and acrobating about him; 
we are even stopping to see the white peahen wearing 
her heart out and her tail out against her imprisoning 
wires ; we are delaying to let the flying-cage burst upon 
us in the unrivalled immensity promised. That is, we 
are doing all this in the personalities of those holiday 
companions, who generously found the cage as wide 
and high as their chair-men wished, and gratefully 
gloated upon its pelicans and storks and cranes and 

355 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

swan 3 and wild geese and wood-ducks and curlews and 
sea-pigeons, and gulls, and whatever other water- 1 owl 
soars and swims. It was well, they felt, to have had 
this kept for the last, with its great lesson of a com- 
munistic captivity in which all nations of men might 
be cooped together in amity and equality, instead of 
being, as now, shut up each in his own cell of need and 
fear. 

■Not having come in an automobile, the companions 
were forced by an invidious regulation to find their 
carriage outside the gate of the Concourse ; but neither 
the horse nor the driver seemed to feel the slight of 
the discrimination. They started off to complete the 
round of the park with all their morning cheerfulness 
and more; for they had now added several dollars to 
their tariff of charges by the delay of their fares, and 
they might well be gayer. Their fares did not refuse 
to share their mood, and when they crossed the Bronx 
and came into the region of the walks and drives they 
were even gayer than their horse and man. These were 
more used to the smooth level of the river where it 
stretched itself out between its meadowy shores and 
mirrored the blue heaven, rough with dusky white 
clouds, in its bosom ; they could not feel, as their fares 
did, the novelty in the beauty of that hollow, that wide 
grassy cup by which they drove, bathed in the flowery 
and blossomy sweetness that filled it to its wood-bor- 
dered brim. 

But what is the use of counting one by one the joys 
of a day so richly jewelled with delight? Rather let us 
heap them at once in the reader's lap and not try to 
part the recurrence of the level-branched dogwoods in 
bloom; the sunny and the shadowy reaches of the woods 
still in the silken fllminess of their fresh young leaves ; 
the grass springing slenderly, tenderly on the unmown 

356 



A DAY AT BEONX PARK 

slopes of the roadsides, or giving up its life in spicy 
sweetness from the scythe; the gardeners pausing from 
their leisurely employ, and once in the person of their 
foreman touching their hats to the companions; the 
wistaria-garlanded cottage of the keeper of the estate 
now ceded to the city; the Gothic stable of the former 
proprietor looking like a Gothic chapel in its dell; the 
stone mansion on its height opening to curiosity a vague 
collection of minerals, and recalling with its dim, hard- 
wood interior the ineffectual state of a time already 
further outdated than any colonial prime ; the old snuff- 
mill of the founders, hard by; the dam breaking into 
foam in the valley below; the rustic bridge crossing 
from shore to shore, with steel-engraving figures leaning 
on its parapet and other steel-engraving presences by 
the water's brink. 

The supreme charm is that you are so free to all 
things in that generous park ; that you may touch them 
and test them by every sense ; that you may stray among 
the trees, and lie down upon the grass, and possess 
yourself indiscriminately of them quite as if they were 
your own. 

They are indeed yours in the nobler sense of pub- 
lic proprietorship which will one day, no doubt, super- 
sede all private ownership. You have your share of 
the lands and waters, the birds in the cages and the 
beasts, from the lions and elephants in their palaces, 
and the giraffes freely browsing and grazing in their 
paddock, down to the smallest of the small mammals 
giving their odor in their pens. You have as much 
right as another to the sculptures (all hand-carved, as 
your colored chair-man will repeatedly tell you) on the 
mansions of the lordlier brutes, and there is none to 
dispute your just portion of the Paris-green zinc iguana, 
for you have helped pay for them all. 

357 



IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS 

The key-word of this reflection makes you anxious to 
find whether your driver will make you pay him too 
much, but when you tot up the hours by his tariff, and 
timidly suggest that it will be so many dollars and 
offer him a bill for the same, he surprises you by say- 
ing, No, he owes you fifty cents on that; and paying 
it back. 

Such at least was the endearing experience of the 
companions at the end of their day's pleasure. Not 
that it was really the end, for there was the airy swoop 
homeward in the Elevated train, through all that ugly 
picturesqueness of bridges and boats and blocks of 
buildings, with the added interest of seeing the back- 
flying streets below now full of children let loose from 
school for the afternoon, and possessing the roadways 
and sidewalks as if these, too, were common property 
like the park. It seemed to the companions that the 
children increased toward the shabbier waterside, and 
decreased wherever the houses looked better, through 
that mystical law of population by which poverty is 
richer than prosperity is in children. They could see 
them yelling and screaming at their games, though they 
could not hear them, and they yelled and screamed the 
louder to the eye because they were visibly for the 
greatest part boys. If they were the offspring of alien 
parents, they might be a proof of American decay; 
but, on the other hand, the preponderance of boys was 
in repair of that disproportion of the sexes which in 
the east of these States is such a crying evil. 

Perhaps it was the behavior of the child in the op- 
posite seat which made the companions think of girls 
as a crying evil; the mental operations are so devious 
and capricious; but this child was really a girl. She 
was a pretty child and prettily dressed, with a little 
face full of a petulant and wilful charm, which might 

358 



A DAY AT BRONX PARK 

well have been too much for her weak, meek young 
mother. She wanted to be leaning more than half out 
of the window and looking both ways at once, and she 
fought away the feebly restraining hands with sharp, 
bird-like shrieks, so that the companions expected every 
moment to see her succeed in dashing herself to death, 
and suffered many things from their fear. When it 
seemed as if nothing could save them, the guard came 
in and told the weak, meek mother that the child must 
not lean out of the window. Instantly, such is the 
force of all constituted authority among us, the child 
sat down quietly in her mother's lap, and for the rest 
of the journey remained an example to angels, so that 
the companions could rejoice as much in her goodness 
as in her loveliness. She became, indeed, the crown of 
their happy day, a day so happy that now in the faint 
air of August it is hard to believe it even of May. 



THE END 



CCT 15 ^10 



One copy del. to Cat. Div. 
OCT 15 1910 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




012 074 278 4 









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